How to Follow Others in Google+

By Jesse Stay from Google+ For Dummies, Portable Edition

On Google+ (Google's social networking site), a follower is someone who circles you. However, you don’t just follow every person you “follow.” Instead, you circle them, which means you choose which circles they belong to.

Everything on Google+ revolves around circling people you want to follow, or applying content so that only particular circles can see that content. Before you can get anything from the Google+ experience, you need to follow some people by adding them to your circles.

Picking whom to follow on Google+

After you have completed your Google+ profile, you're ready to find some people to follow, which you can do in a few different ways:

Follow the recommendations. You can start by just following the recommendations on the right side of the page. Google+ chooses these recommendations based on the information you filled out in your profile, as well as those people whom you already circled and those who circled you, along with the information they filled out in their profiles.
Search for people. You can start searching for people you know. Just enter names in the search bar at the top, and you’ll immediately see recommendations based on those names. Or if you know their e-mail addresses, you can obtain even more accurate recommendations by just entering their e-mail address in the search bar.
Import your contacts. You can go to your circles page via the circles icon at the top of Google+ (see the figure below), and by giving Google+ some more information about your contact list, Google+ can provide more suggestions. To do so, click the little circles icon at the top of Google+, click Find People, and choose from the options provided (Yahoo, Hotmail, Upload Your Address Book, and so on). Or go with one of the people it already suggests.

Finding new friends to circle.

Organizing your Google+ followers

Once you’ve picked some people to follow, you need to add them to a circle. You may want to start by going to your circles page and clicking the circle named Drop Here to Create a New Circle. Clicking that circle enables you to create a new circle and add people to it.

There are then two ways to add people to a circle:

Drag them to the circle in which you want them (they can be in as many circles as you like).
When you see their name in Google+, just mouse over their name and select the check boxes for the circles to which you want to add them.

It’s that simple! Once your friends or contacts are added to at least one circle, you will immediately start seeing them in your stream.