[VIDEO] Ripples The Google + Feature Nobody Knows About

Find Out Who’s Sharing Your Content

Google Plus Ripples is a great little analytics tool that lets you graphically identify people who’ve shared your content and find out just how influential they really are.

This video tutorial will show you how to take advantage of Ripples and start improving your Google Plus network right now.

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Transcription of the Google Plus Ripples Tutorial Video

Hey everyone this is Tod Hirsch. Just finished this little video on how to improve your Google Plus network by using Google+ Ripples.

What is Google Plus Ripples?

So what exactly is Google Plus Ripples? Like I said, it is a Google Plus feature and it’s probably one of the least known and least publicized of all the Google Plus features.  But the main purpose of Ripples is that it allows you to graphically see who has publicly shared your Google Plus posts, your content.  It’s pretty cool because it allows you to build up you network, see you influencers and it’s really an interesting little analytics tool that’s completely free obviously and it’s built directly into Google Plus and requires no configuration or anything whatsoever.

How Do You Use Google Plus Ripples?

OK, so how do you use, how do you view Google Plus Ripples…The easiest thing to do is go to one of your posts. Here’s one that I made earlier today. This is just a re-share or a re-post of an article that Avinash Kaushik shared called, How America Spends Money: 100 Years in the Life of the Family.  He shared that from a publication called The Atlantic.

What you do is go to this little tiny arrow in the upper right corner of the post, you click on it and go to View Ripples.

So after you click on View Ripples, you’re brought to this page, which is the graphical representation of the viral reach of post. As you can see here, Avinash was the original creator of the post and you can also see all the other people who originally shared his post. So Rand Fishkin, Tyler Merrick, Estaban Contreras. And all these are the people who have the bigger networks represented by the bigger circles. And within their circles you see people who have reshared their share and all of these smaller circles are people who have shared the original Avinash Kaushik post as well, but they just happen to have smaller networks.  Here I am here, obviously very small and tiny but getting bigger hopefully.

Google Plus Ripples Only Shows Public Shares

One quick note, Google Plus Ripples only shows public shares. So if Avinash, he originally created this for his Public group, no private circles. And all the other data from that you see here from all the other people they also shared to the Public and not to any of their private circles.

You Can Easily Add People to Your Circles from Ripples

So another thing that is interesting is that whenever you mouse-over one of the circles, you can see that person, you can see their photo and their name and also whether you’re in their Circles or not  or rather if they are in your Circles.But that’s an interesting feature and an interesting way to be able to increase the size of  your network for people who sharing your content, right? Because that’s really how you build up your network  is by identifying who is sharing your content, following them and establishing relationships

Ripples Analytics Data

Down at the bottom of the Ripples page is some interesting analytics data around the post. The first one you see here is…you can see the spread of the post over time. Initially, there was a lot of posting..a lot of sharing going on and then it tapered off to nothing and then you can see a few blips over the past week.

Down at the bottom, you see a list of influencers. For people who are not in your network, this is a great opportunity for you to click on them, to see if they’re interesting…to see if you want to add them to your network and hopefully they will follow you back which is obviously how you will increase the size of your Google Plus network

This has some interesting statistics of things like Average Chain Length which is an indication of how many people reshared reshares. So if give you an indication of how interesting people felt the post was. Shares per hour gives you an idea of the velocity of the shares that went on.

Ripples for URL

Another interesting feature of Google Plus Ripples is this thing up here at the top called “See Ripples for URL”.  Basically what this is is you can copy and paste any URL from any web page on the Internet, and it will give you an indication of what Google Plus users have shared your content on Google Plus. So for example, last week I created a post called “7 Ways Google is Truly Making Content King” on the Business2Community website. So I can just copy and paste that URL like so…hit Go and it shows me all the different Google Plus users who shared that particular piece of content. This is not a Google Plus page, it’s just a regular web page so it doesn’t have all the arrows and connections and stuff. But it is interesting because you can see the different users who shared your stuff and you can follow them. So you go there and see hey, am I following this person on Google Plus or not. Looks like I’m following most of these people. But if you’re not, it’s a great opportunity to, again, like we were talking about before, to increase the size of your network.

Google Plus Ripples Tutorial Summary

So in summary, Google Plus Ripples is a great little free analytics tool that lets you graphically see the people who are sharing your content, people who are re-sharing your content and most importantly lets you identify new people who maybe are not in your Circles yet so you can follow them and increase the size of your network.

So I hope this was interesting and if you have any questions, please leave any comments in the comments section. Thank you.