Organize your Google+ circles

Good news about a test I just made:

I moved almost 2000 profiles around my circles

Without any "You've reached the daily limit of adding people..." stuff from Google+. So it seems at least the Circle Management problem has been fixed, YAY!

Just a few Error 500's but I waited a bit and the copying was done. Patience!

I had over 50 circles with many overlapping people. As I almost never use my circles for sharing but only for reading, I decided to move folks to larger circles and delete the extras.

NOTE: This may work differently for you or someone else: It all depends on the profile activity!
People are asking why they can't circle more people all of a sudden:
If you have circled people very randomly and have added "megahugeballcircles" getting a lot of spammers connected to your account, that may have an effect on your future circling abilities, too!

Go to your ‘Circles’ page 

You can move the existing circles around by grabbing them and dropping them in a new place.

Click on a circle.

The circle you're operating on is black and now shows the symbols for edit, share and delete. The people in the circle are displayed on top:  Click on Actions and choose Select all.

Grab the now blue part and move it on top of the circle where you want the profiles to reside. Check that when the "bunch" of profiles is on top, the circle under it displays the profile thumbnails already in it. Release and wait. You will get a pop-up notification that the profiles have been moved; now you can delete the "old" circle. Repeat.


My Great Circle has 1970 pages / profiles...  All my Finnish people are in one large circle, too.
Now it's easy to share posts in my own language to the Finn circle and also check the Great circle with +Circloscope tool and sort the inactive profiles.

I have a "Test" circle for new people: If I like what they post, they will be moved to the Great circle. Or even to my Notifications / subscription circle.

Those people whom I must keep circled but whose posts I don't very much enjoy are in a stealth circle which is muted. :-)

Sharing your circles and interests

This is a good way to let others too find people who are interested in your hobby: Perhaps you have found excellent Google+ users who share your passion and would like your other circles or the general public to also enjoy their posts or content.

You can also share your own personal circles with a business page.

Sharing a circle is very easy to do:

Go to your ‘Circles’ page and find the circle in question. Click the circle: You see all the people in it displayed at the top of the page. Now go and look at the circle at the lower half of the page and you’ll see in the center of it ‘Edit / Share / Delete’.

By clicking the Share you get choices: Public, all circles or just one, extended circles or then you can just +name and share it with few people, your friends for example.

You may also change the name and description of the circle from 'Edit'.

Delete removes the circle and the people in it: If you have same people in several circles, they don't disappear from those.

After reorganizing your circles

It's a good idea to go through all the circle settings. Go to your Home page from the left column, start clicking on the circles in your list.
Change the settings for each: This way you can control how your Home stream looks like.

If you click on the bell icon, you'll get notification / email (depending on your settings) of each post.

If you untick the Show posts in home stream then the circle is muted and you won't see any posts in your Home stream: You must click the circle open to view posts.  That's how my Stealth circle works.

An afterthought

Putting people in Circles is not easy, we tend to post about several topics and if you start to follow someone because of their Android -related posts, whoops! Here they are posting about their dive trip to Palau...  With pictures.

You can't categorize people or put them in compartments.  One should never complain about the topics anyone in your circles posts: It's purely their choice. You have to take the good with the bad or uncircle.

Google+ is the first platform where I've seen people think that "I post about the topics that interest ME" and not about stuff that they think might interest someone else or their readership. Google+ is honest in that way, especially when folks realize that they can just be themselves and that there are scores of others who think likewise. An audience for everyone.

By the way...

Communities are a good place to read and post about topics: Circles are all about people.

Read more about circle sharing, your circle settings and notifications