Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Taking a Look at Shared Content Metrics

Shared content metrics are given a lot of importance right now in the social web space. On the social web, sharing is a given.

Gone are the days when people wanted to visit or promote a website with locked-down content. If they see something of value (or, judging by my RSS feed sometimes, anything cute and furry like a kitten), they immediately want to tell everyone they know to go look at it.

In fact, people want to be the first to tell people they know to go look at it and the source everyone else uses to share it as well. In the social web, being the source for something that goes viral holds a sort of mental cachet for people.

Google has capitalized on this trend in Google+ with its metrics for that sharing platform, Ripples. Ripples gives people sharing and interacting with content on Google+ an immediate, gorgeous visual of the strength of that content being shared in Google.

Figure 7-2 shows an example from a piece of content shared by actor Wil Wheaton that dramatically shows how far a post can go.

What’s interesting about Ripples from a metrics standpoint is its obvious future implications for Google’s other metrics tool, Analytics, and its potential future application to shared content on the web. However, at the time of this writing, you still need to share content on sites like Google+ with a trackable link as well so that you can bring it in to your metrics dashboard.

Figure 7-2: Sample of Google+ Ripples on a Wil Wheaton ...