Google Plus recently introduced a new public metric on user profiles where they show the total number of post views the user has generated. This, in itself, is an interesting metric, because it shows how active each user is on Google Plus, and how many people have actually viewed posts they have made. But I have decided to take this number one step further, and introduce a brand new quality metric: Views Per Follower (VPF).

Views Per Follower (VPF) should be calculated as follows:

Number of Total Views / Number of Followers

That the number of total views a user has generated, divided by the number of followers the user has. The higher the VPF number, the more “reach” this user has, and, I believe, the higher the quality posts that the user is posting. It could also indicate how “engaged” those followers are, because the more engaged they are the more Google Plus tends to show that users’s posts to followers. Let’s look at some specific examples, using specific users:

Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land):
Number of Followers: 1,757,629
Number of Views: 37,878,093
Views Per Follower VPF: 21.5

As you can see, for every follower that Danny Sullivan has, each follower has viewed an average of 21.5 of his posts. Let’s take a look, though, at another public profile, the profile of Sergey Brin from Google:

Sergey Brin (Google):
Number of Followers: 5,797,236
Number of Views: 28,946,666
Views Per Follower VPF: 4.99

And, just to be fair, let’s take a look at my personal Google Plus profile, as a comparison. Remember, the higher the VPF number, the better: which means that this user’s followers are more “engaged”, and they view more posts that the user makes.

Bill Hartzer
Number of Followers: 16,139
Number of Views: 9,163,089
Views Per Follower VPF: 567.76

Danny Sullivan’s posts on Google Plus are viewed by more of his followers, but what his numbers show are that there are a lot of followers who do NOT see his posts, and I bet that a lot of those followers aren’t very active on Google Plus. They know they should be following Danny Sullivan because, well, he’s Danny Sullivan. But they’re not very “engaged” with Danny’s posts. But compared to Sergey Brin’s followers, Danny looks really good: Sergey’s followers are really, really not very engaged, are most likely not very active on Google Plus, and just don’t see many of Sergey’s posts.

But let’s take my profile, for example. Sure, I don’t have a million or five million followers on Google Plus. But, if you look at my VPF, you’ll see that my 16,000 followers are highly engaged, active Google Plus users. They see my posts. They engage with my posts enough so that Google Plus shows them more of my posts.

There are a lot of different reasons why your Google Plus’ profile VPF is what it is, but you have to keep in mind that a quality profile on Google Plus isn’t dependent on the number of followers you have. In fact, it’s all about how engaged your users are: and by calculating the VPF for a user’s profile will show how active, how good their posts, are, and, how engaged that users’ followers are on Google Plus.

So, what’s your Views Per Follower VPF? Is yours higher or lower than mine?

Bill Hartzer is Globe Runner’s Senior SEO Strategist. Follow him on Google Plus.

Gideon Rosenblatt has also come up with, essentially, the same type of metric, and there’s an interesting discussion going on over on his Google Plus post.