Are you on Google+? Are you aware of the insight you can
gain from social content?
Google+ is a relatively new platform for businesses
and marketers.
While the concept of circles is a great way to keep in touch and interact
directly with a specific niche, there’s one feature that doesn’t seem to get
that much press, and is actually quite beneficial to businesses. It’s called Ripples.
What is Google Ripples?
Ripples is a feature that shows you interactive graphs
of everyone who has shared a specific post. Ripples is only available
on posts that are sent out to “Public” and only displays those who shared the
post publicly.
The Laughing Squid posts funny and interesting blog posts on
Google+.
As any marketer will agree, it’s important to have a
visual representation of how well your content is performing on social
media platforms. Not only does it give you a clear picture of data, but
it also helps when conveying that data to those higher up in your company.
Unlike with other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter,
where some of the more exciting and informative tools are third-party apps, Ripples
is built directly intoGoogle+ and requires absolutely zero configuration.
In this post, I’ll show you how to view Ripples,
decode the data and use this data to your advantage.
How to Use Ripples
First, find a post that has been shared with “Public” and
has at least a few shares. To get started, we’ll take a look at a
recent post by Starbucks on their official brand page.
In the top right-hand corner of every public post, you’ll
see a little arrow. Click that and if a post has had some shares, “View
Ripples” will show. Clicking that will open up a detailed graph of all
the people who shared.
Starbucks shares the story of Dan who brings coffee to
cancer patients.
People enjoyed the story of Dan, who brings coffee to cancer
patients.
As you can see with the screenshot above, Starbucks received
17 shares total and the graph is showing the 9 most recent. Scrolling over top
of a bubble and someone’s name will display a little box that shows
what they said in their share, if anything, as well as link to their
post.
Paul added two hashtags to bring more attention to his
share.
Now, while this is a great way of visualizing who shared a
post, the real gold is in the fact that people who helped contribute
more shares by their circlers sharing are displayed as a larger bubble.
This makes it easy to identify who has some
potentially extra clout and is helping get your posts out there to
even more people. Small businesses and big brands can use the Ripples feature
to very easily see not only who’s sharing their content, but also who’s helping
beyond that.
Find Your Influencers
Every business has its influencers—people who contribute
quite a bit to your bottom line both online and offline. In social media, an
influencer can be someone who shares a lot of your content and drives
interaction.
In any instance, finding these influencers is important to making sure that you
maintain and further build a relationship. While there’s very little data on
Google+ to discover at the moment, aside from how many people are circling a
person (which isn’t necessarily the best metric), Ripples are the
beginning of the analytics likely to come.
Red Bull benefits greatly from sharing their extreme sports
videos.
As we stated in the beginning of this post, visually seeing
that data is important, as it is much easier to decode than sorting through
text or having to jump from profile to profile of those who shared your
content.
The circles concept on Google+ aids greatly in this
instance, which leads us to the next tip…
Group Your Influencers
Over time, you’ll get an idea of who shares your content the
most and who helps contribute beyond in that aspect. With Facebook pages, you
unfortunately can’t use the Lists feature, which is only available to those who
have a personal profile.
With Google+ however, both individuals and brands
have the ability to create circles.
This is great because now you can group your
influencers into their very own circle and make sure to nurture the
relationship with them. Send out exclusive content, interact directly, start
a hangout with just that circle, you name it.
Hangouts are fantastic for relationship-building and great
discussions.
The topic of influencers shouldn’t take all of your focus
away from everyone else in your audience, but knowing who in your audience aids
a step or two beyond will give you that extra edge when it comes to using the
social network for your business.
What do you think? Are you investing time into Google+?
How are you using it?
-Mike Stenger
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