Google Plus Ripples

Google Plus Ripples is such a wicked feature compared to any other social platform you’ve been on. And it is completely free. Google Plus Ripples, according to Google, is an interactive graphic of public shares of any public post on Google+ to show the user how it has “rippled” through the network and help you discover new and interesting people to follow. The “share” option is pretty much the same on Facebook and on Google Plus, but G+ kicks it up a notch by showing you a visual diagram of what happened. This is particularly useful for business pages with a lot of activity on Google Plus that want to track exactly who shared what and the audience reached.

To view your “Ripples” for a public post just click the dropdown arrow at the top right of the post and you will see an option that says “View Ripples”.

Each new circle is a user who shared the link, and inside that circle will be users who shared the link from that person. Circle size is also helpful because they represent the “relative influence” of that person. We assume Google Plus Ripples measures influence by variables such as number of circles that person has and other similar factors. The image below is an example from Google themselves.

To the right of the circles on the side bar you can see the comments users wrote when they shared your post. If there’s too many shares, only the users whose names are in the diagram will have their comments displayed on the sidebar. You can hover over each name to view the circler’s comment as well. You can zoom in and out to see other users and subsequently hover over their name to see any comments.

Below the circles you will see “Watch the spread of this post” and right below you’ll see a horizontal timeline with a play button and dates. If you got a lot of shares for a post over time, this is a neat tool to see how your post was shared and “reshared” by others over time. If your post was online for quite some time it’ll be a few minutes before any new circles pop up in the playback. But soon, you’ll start to see them grow and sprout like fresh daises. It’s really fun to see how your post was shared in video format along with a linear chart with spikes to show when your post was shared where it says “reshares over time.”

As you can see at the very bottom Google Plus Ripples provides you with short statistics on your post in three short columns: “Influencers”, “Statistics”, and “Languages”. Influencers will show users who share your post the most. Next, the statistics tab has an “average chain length” value which is an average calculated from the number of shares your posts have had per user. The “longest chain” category is the most number of shares your posts have ever had. And the “shares/hour” is the average number of shares all your posts tend to receive per hour. On the right is the “languages of public shares of this post” which is pretty self-explanatory.

Ripples only uses shares from G+ posts that are set to public so if the only user who shared your post chose to share the post only to their private friends then there will be NO Google Ripples option on the right-hand side.

To share your Google Plus Ripples on your G+ stream first click the “view ripples” option and then you are taken to your post’s ripple page. Simply copy the URL in your browser of the ripples page and post it in a G+ post. It will show a link and an image which is a direct link to the Google Ripples visualization for the post.