Social media can sometimes feel like a firehose of data. Google’s measurement tools will soon make it easier to understand Google+ activity: what people are saying about your business, how many +1's your business receives and how these affect your traffic.
Search on Google+ can help you as much as it helps your customers. You can search keywords, names or anything else, and use your search results to understand better what people are saying about your brand, reward superfans with rebate coupons or even jump in to help resolve customer service issues.
Word travels fast online. Ripples let you see your posts spread across Google+, who’s sharing and resharing your content and whose opinions matter. Use it to identify influencers and add them to a circle, or see how communities are formed around your content.
How do +1's affect user behavior? A new set of social reports in Google Analytics will show you. Measure +1's and how engagement on your site changes when personalized recommendations help people find your content across Google products. Also see which of your web pages people are sharing (via a re-share in Google+) or engaging with (via +1 or comment) directly within Google Analytics.
Data trumps guessing every time. That’s why in the coming weeks we will be launching tools to give you access to as much data as possible about your Google+ page and +1 activity: who’s interacting with your page and how; your users’ demographics; and info about their social activities like +1's, shares and comments -- all to help you learn how social campaigns affect your bottom line.
Ready to start building for the Google+ platform? This first release of the Google+ API, which includes read access to public data and a hangouts API, should be helpful, but we’re just getting started. We’ll be keeping a close eye on your feedback and will release more APIs into production as soon as they’re ready.
