Case Study: Implementing a viral loop
We shipped a feature that led to countless shares of our tool across LinkedIn and Facebook.
There are three major strategies to create such a viral loop:
Collaborative
Incentivized
Incidental
(Read about the different strategies to create a viral loop here)
In our case, we went with the incidental strategy (since there is little reason to collaborate with our tool:The “Sellics Product Analyzer” (formerly “Sellics Benchmarker”) is a free tool for Amazon Advertisers to see how well they are doing with their advertising compared to their competitors.
In order to implement a viral loop, we will focus on the following factors from STEPPS:
Triggers: What is the most effective trigger we can use?
Social currency: How can we create a form of social currency for users that they would share?
Public residue: How can we do it in a way that will be visible to many potential users for the sellics benchmarker.
Trigger: When people open their report, they will see a link with their certificate at the top:
After some experimentation, it turned out that the more effective trigger was sending users an email with their certificate and sharing link. Most likely because users wanted to first study their results and insights when first seeing the report, instead of sharing their badge.
Social currency: Users get to share their certificate on Linkedin, proving to be a high performing Amazon advertiser.
Example:
Public residue: Since the post that links to Sellics stays online, and is often liked by many people, it gets exposure over time.
Example:
Over time this accumulates to quite a few posts:
And as a loop it looks like this:
In conclusion, this project was a nice experiment, but certainly no silver bullet to massively change the growth trajectory. Nevertheless, it shows that virality has potential even for products that don’t have the typical properties that facilitate a viral growth model.
Sources: 1 - Reforge Growth Series | 2 - Jonah Berger - Contagious
