7. Give the right incentives

OK, now you’ve made it easy for your users to reach the viral point. They’re there. Ready. Will they actually share your product? What influences their decision?

It’s whether they have a strong incentive to do it or not.

In traditional products, incentives are just something that’s valuable to the user. For example, it can be a discount on your purchase. Or, like in Dropbox’s case, free storage.

What types of incentives work best in virals? Incentives that are good for both the sender and the receiver.

The sender has reached the viral point and wants to share the viral because he’s getting something in return. But he doesn’t want to abuse the relationship with his friends. If he’s the only one getting a benefit, it comes across as inconsiderate and selfish.

Source: en.blobla.com via Facebook

However, if the receiver also gets something, it’s a win-win! The sender can say: Hey, sign up for this, we both get something!

Source: Wealthfront referral bonus

Have incentives for both the sender and the receiver.

Not all products need extrinsic incentives. In the case of communication tools, the viral is the incentive itself. The sender has an intrinsic motivation to want to send the communication to the receiver because he wants the information to be conveyed.

Are there other intrinsic motivations to share a viral? Yes: identity.

8. The viral reflects your identity

We said before that sex grabs people’s attention.

How many virals do you know with a high sexual content? Probably close to none. Why?

Nobody wants to be that person.

What kind of person shares sexual content on Facebook? Who is going to tweet porn? People don’t want to be associated with that.

Interestingly, Tumblr does have plenty of porn. What’s the difference? On Tumblr, you are AnotherRandoThatNobodyKnows291. Your Tumblr identity is not your true identity. You can hide behind your username to share whatever you want. And, obviously, because people are interested in porn, there’s a lot of porn. They just don’t want to have their true identity associated with it.

Share of Tumblr users with respect to their relationship to porn (source: Pornography Consumption in Social Media)

That tells us a core truth about virality: that the viral reflects your identity. What you share determines who you are. It reflects what you stand for.

Let’s take another polemic example: violence. Broadly, people don’t share violence because it doesn’t reflect positively on them. An exception is unfairness. Why did shootings of black people by white policemen spread virally? Because those sharing that content were not just spreading the word. They were also making a statement about who they are: “These killings are important enough to me that I want you to see me as the kind of person who shares about that topic on Facebook.”

When people share a selfie, it’s pretty transparent that they’re making a statement about themselves. Same as when they’re sharing a post about their holidays. Why do people share images of their beautiful food but not of what they ate today at home? Just because it’s boring? No. Because it doesn’t reflect positively on them. Like when they don’t share their fights with their partner, or their failures.

When people share something on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, they’re making a statement about themselves. If they share an interesting article, they’re also saying, “Look how interesting I am that I share this article.” If they share a video about a cute puppy, they’re saying, “How cute am I that I like this kind of video, and how nice am I that I share it with you.”

What you share determines who you are. It reflects what you stand for.

The structure of the social network determines how important the identity is, and hence how much people share. Facebook is a curated public image, so people are very careful of what they post.

Because Twitter posts are ordered more chronologically, it doesn’t matter as much what you post, so people post much more loosely there. But tweets still live forever, so people are somewhat careful about what they post.

Snapchat’s innovation was to keep the true identity of users while reducing how much their posts reflect on their identity. By making the posts disappear, it didn’t matter as much to the user whether they reflected greatly on them or not. Understanding this point well was worth billions of dollars.

What’s the lesson when crafting virals? You need to think about how the viral element will reflect on the sender. If it’s positive, if it’s something to be proud of, people will share it. If not, they won’t.

When crafting virals, always reflect: What will people want to share?

9. Send to as many friends as possible

Back during the Old West of social media, when Facebook embraced spam, gold wasn’t a yellow metal. It was called “multi-friend selectors”, or MFS.

Source: Facebook multi-friend selector via codersgrave

When users reach the viral point, you want them to send the viral to as many friends as possible.

This is what the MFS did really well. It was a spam machine: With one click, you could send the viral to hundreds of people. Product managers used plenty of tricks to optimize it, such as auto-selecting all your friends, showing their pictures instead of their names (with images, fewer names fit on the popup, so it looked like you were inviting fewer people), hiding most friends below the fold, and many others.

Thankfully, those days are gone. This was a terrible experience, built to take advantage of customers.

But the viral principle is still valid: You want your user to send a viral to as many people as possible.

A product such as Wealthfront, a digital investment advice company, has a harder time growing virally than Dropbox, for many reasons. But one of them is that Dropbox may have value for everybody you know with a strong online presence. If you’re about to send Dropbox to your friends so you both get some space for free, you’re going to send that to as many friends as you can.

Conversely, how many friends do you know that have enough money to invest and enough knowledge to feel good about a robot managing their money? Very few. As a result, even if Wealthfront offers $5,000 managed for free for every friend you bring to the platform, you’re going to be very careful about whom you invite. Maybe you’ll handpick 3–4 people, and that’s it.

Takeaway: You want to try to have virals that people feel comfortable sending to as many friends as possible.

10. Layer viral channels

OK, you’ve built a viral loop that is fully optimized. Now what?

Do more. Layer channels.

Once you have a viral loop, you want to try to find other channels by which people spread the product virally.

For example, companies make an effort to allow as many mechanisms as possible to send the viral, whether it’s email, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, or anything else.

With our Horoscopes app, we posted on our users’ feeds every day, but we also sent them notifications.

Social games enabled you to post your progress on your feed, send notifications to friends, post on your friends’ feeds, send emails….

You don’t want to be spammy, because it’s bad for the user. That means it’s also bad for you in the long term. So don’t use different channels just to get more virality. Rather, use them as different mechanisms for different viral use cases.

For example, you might have a referral program that crawls the user’s email or phone list to propose contacts who are likely to be interested in the referral. You might also have a different viral to easily allow your users to contact other users who are already in your platform. These are completely different use cases that have value for the user and also for the business.

11. Hack APIs for impressions

Facebook was ridiculously loose with its viral policies at the beginning of the 2010s, because it wanted to grow at all costs. Enabling people to notify each other all the time was a great reengagement mechanism. It also attracted plenty of developers, who created lots of apps for Facebook, adding value to the platform, and hence to its users.

That meant it was a golden era to understand exactly how their viral mechanisms worked, and how to take advantage of them.

For example, at some point Facebook enabled developers to post messages on the walls of a user’s friends. Imagine that: Olivia has 200 friends, and Facebook enables a developer to post a message on the walls of all of Olivia’s friends, meaning that all her friends’ friends will see that — up to 40,000 people. For free.

Put in another way: You are friends with Olivia. You’ve never heard about a certain app. But that app has all your information and the information of your friends, and it’s using it to impersonate you in front of your friends, posting things on your profile, on your behalf. All just because Olivia used the app.

That is another feature of Facebook that has, happily, disappeared. But there are always new platforms that push virality for growth. Several instant messaging apps, such as Kik and Tango, did that for years. Snapchat is trying to attract videogames. LinkedIn posts get a lot of free impressions in 2019. And platforms like Alexa are probably quite compelling right now.

As a developer, the way to increase the impressions per viral message is to understand better than anybody else how the rules work.

For example, when working on Horoscopes, we realized that we were posting a new horoscope message to every person. That meant that every horoscope had barely any like or comment. Facebook takes likes and comments as signals that something is interesting, so it thought all our horoscopes weren’t interesting and didn’t show them to our users’ friends.

Instead, we decided to make the horoscope posts the same for all users of a given sign. Suddenly, all the comments and likes were aggregated into a few posts with lots of likes and comments, and those spread much more. A simple change in how we qualified a post to the Facebook API meant more free traffic.

Takeaway: Understand the rules so you can adapt your viral to the platform.

12. Send it daily

If users get 0.1 friends every time they send a viral, that’s not going to get you very far. Sure, you’ll add 10% to your growth. But that’s not game-changing.

What if instead of sending only one viral, they send one every day for a month? Suddenly, you get 30 x 0.1 = 3 friends for every new user within a month. That’s the difference between stagnating and exploding in growth, because of the compounding of viral:

You start with a small ad campaign and get 1,000 users.

After a month, you have 3,000 more, so 4,000 in total.

The second month, you have 16,000.

The third, 64,000.

Then 256,000.

And 512,000.

Two million the sixth month.

Eight million the seventh.

Thirty-two million the eighth….

We learned that from the Horoscopes app: Every day, you had a new horoscope, so you had a reason to spread something new virally. Share it with your friends. Banter.

Conversely, with another app we had, Birthday Cards, you only got one viral opportunity — sending a birthday card — per year for every close friend. If you sent 20 cards per year, that was less than 2 viral opportunities per month, compared to Horoscopes’ 30.

One of the most viral types of apps is communication apps: WhatsApp, Line, WeChat, Skype, Zoom, Snapchat…. Why? Because when you communicate with people, you do it frequently. The more you use the app, the more virality it has.

Referral bonuses are not great for the opposite reason. When you’re sending access to Dropbox to get more space available, you’re going to go through your list of friends once at the beginning, and maybe a second time when you hit your space limit. That’s it.

And when your friends receive it, they will first think about it, research Dropbox and its benefits…. It will take time for them to sign up, so the viral loop is not completed within one day.

Takeaway: Create a product that has at least a daily frequency of viral opportunities.

OK — so these are the 12 virality rules that we took away when analyzing how virality works. We now had a scorecard to judge the virality of different products and to guide us on what to build next.

The Virality Scorecard