In Part 2 of our Google+ series, I’ll show you how the Ripples feature makes identifying influencers and nurturing those important customer relationships easy.
While Google+ Circles seem to get the most attention, the fast-growing social network’s Ripples feature is an overlooked marketing gem. Ripples is an analytics tool that shows you who has shared each of your posts. Using interactive graphs, Ripples provides clear analysis of everyone who has passed along your content, as well as what they had to say about it.
What’s unique about Ripples is that it requires no configuration to get it working on your Google+ business page. While the most helpful tools on other platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, are often third-party apps, Ripples is built directly into the Google+ platform. To keep privacy concerns at bay, all posts analyzed by Ripples must have been sent out to “Public,” and the tool only displays those posts that were shared publicly as well.
How to Use Ripples
On every Public post that has been shared, you will find an arrow in the top right corner. Click the arrow to get to a drop-down containing “View Ripples.” When you click on this, you are presented with a graph of bubbles representing all the users who have shared that post.
Users who have contributed to the most shares will appear as larger bubbles in the graph, and you can find out what each user said about your content by scrolling over a bubble.
How to Find Influencers
Because users contributing to the most shares are displayed as larger bubbles, you can clearly see who is talking about your brand and sharing your content the most. These people are your influencers – those customers who help promote your brand the most online.
The tidy Ripples feature gives you an instant overview and identification of your influencers on Google+. Instead of sifting through text and browsing countless profiles, you can instantly see who is sharing and driving interaction for your business.
How to Group Influencers
After studying interaction on your social media pages, you begin to learn who your influencers are. With Facebook pages, businesses have no way to group these influencers using the Lists feature because it is only available on personal profiles. However, Google+ allows both individuals and businesses to create circles.
You can easily group your Google+ influencers into their own circle to further nurture these important customer relationships. Try sending out exclusive content, gathering feedback, and interacting individually with your influencers. Just be sure not to neglect the rest of your Google+ community.
Ripples gives marketers an easy-to-decipher visual representation of how well your content is performing on Google+. This information can help guide future marketing campaigns and assist you in conveying important data to management.
Have you unearthed this marketing analytics gem? How are you using Ripples to inform your marketing strategies?
Image courtesy of frombogotawithlove.com
Google+
