Viral Marketing Strategies

[joblife]

Hey guys,

Let's talk about specific viral marketing strategies: ideas we have or things we have already put into play.

I've thought about introducing this kind of strategy by either giving my users a social benefit/monetary benefit in exchange for the details of 3 friends which will aid in growth.

 

[Raymond Luo]

For me, having a red circle around the focus of an image seems to work incredibly well (for now).

I don't think asking for details of three friends will work very well. Too much work, and intrusive, personal space encroaching.

Here's one im interested to know. When it comes to "virality", does quantity or quality of post better your chances at having one succeed?

1. ViralNova one man show (with VAs) that pushes out 20 posts a day.

2. Waitbutwhy puts out one lengthy one once every.... there and then.

If you have the choice of producing two posts at average quality or one post with refinement, which would you go for? (This is on increasing virality potential)

 

[builder]

Here's one im interested to know. When it comes to "virality", does quantity or quality of post better your chances at having one succeed?

1. ViralNova one man show (with VAs) that pushes out 20 posts a day.

2. Waitbutwhy puts out one lengthy one once every.... there and then.

If you have the choice of producing two posts at average quality or one post with refinement, which would you go for? (This is on increasing virality potential)

Most, I guess, would say one great/pillar/epic post, but here is an alternate perspective:

If you're doing it yourself, quality increases with quantity. So "two average posts" gradually become two "good posts" and occasionally, "one good post and one great post". This is assuming you are an above average guy who is constantly improving.

If you're hiring someone else, it depends on that person's attitude and the nature of your relation.
Still, even in that case, adding more content gives you more chances of observing first hand what works and what doesn't; and thus, to create highly refined templates for great content, as time goes on.

 

[Samwise89]

Virality is all about the spread, like a virus, spreading faster than algorithms gain an immunity against them.

If your virus doubled in every leap, while paying someone or whatever the OP was talking about, it would go from:

1
2
4
8
16
32
64
128

That's pretty slow. You want to infect a lot more people immediately. That's where the big sites like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter come in. You can expose 100,000 people to your virus in the span of a few hours. If even 1/1000th of those people catch the bug and then share it to 2 people each, you're already at:

100
200
400
800

It can't be very manual. You need a lot of exposure fast. PPC & fan pages on Facebook, default subs on Reddit, big forums, I would slam them all in unison as hard as I could, having prepared posts and everything else so the trigger can be pulled at the same time across the board.

Then, hope your content had the elements of contagion in it.

 

[joblife]

Hi,

What I was actually referring to was the way many apps/portals increase their user base with viral loops AKA growth hacks.

Think Dropbox with their 'refer a friend' setup in exchange for free space.

Or Uber's refer a friend and get a free ride.

I think a viral loop similar to the above can be beneficial to many of our websites/apps and it can be incorporated into a marketing budget.

 

[lion1978]

I think a viral loop similar to the above can be beneficial to many of our websites/apps and it can be incorporated into a marketing budget.

I agree that viral loops can be beneficial to our websites and apps, and the fact is that it can be incorporated in to any marketing budget even if a website is a pure infomartional site, it might need a bit more thinking it over than say for an ecommerce site where you can literally just give a discount on their next purchase or even a specific product for free (ehich is indeed a brilliant strategy couse not only do you gain refferes/virality you also get returning customers).
For a info site I'd start thinking about something that compliments a piece of content on the website and adds so much value to it that it's impossible for the reader to say no thank you.