Secrets of viral marketing: user incentives, promises, and flow engineering
The cheapest form of marketing today is viral. The best way to learn viral marketing today is to grow Facebook apps.
Facebook apps are easy to make and the viral channels are easy to understand. If you can’t grow a Facebook app, you won’t be able to grow anything else, except maybe potatoes.
Main viral channels on Facebook are invitations/requests and notifications.
Viral loop is the part of the flow from a person first learning of an app to sending invitations or notifications to his friends.
Apps are more viral when:
- average number of invitations is high
- acceptance rate is high
- conversion from accepting to inviting is high
To increase the average number of invitations, use incentives (e.g., unlocking items and ranks) and introduce easy ways to send notifications to many friends at once.
To increase acceptance rate, promise information or motivate need to act. Use call to action. Make the call to action unusual and related to the app.
Key way of making conversion from accepting to inviting high is to shorten the loop. Each extra page in the funnel will lose someone.
Viral coefficient = average number of invitations * acceptance rate * conversion from accepting to inviting.
When viral coefficient is greater than 1, the app will start growing.
If the app is engaging, it will grow to its carrying capacity. Otherwise, it will peak and drop off.
Most Facebook apps are not viral and so they never get any users.
Most viral apps are very shallow and do not engage and retain users and so they perish quickly.
Even the viral apps that retain well monetize poorly, because Facebook users do not come there with the intention of buying anything. Typical eCPMs are in dimes and in some cases pennies.
Building Facebook apps is a great way to learn viral marketing, but tens and hundreds of millions of monthly pageviews are needed for them to be successful businesses.
I’ll cover engagement and monetization in more detail later, and I’d be happy to answer specific questions.
