What's your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption

What's a "viral loop?"
A term I've heard tossed around frequently in real life, but not in the blogosphere is the term "viral loop." In fact, when googling it, I only saw one mention from Jia Shen, a very smart guy:

“The viral loop of people inviting each other to most social networks revolves around a user posting a widget to their page and having friends see their page.

The viral loops for Facebook (there are multiple) revolve around the news feed, the mini-feed and the invite request. Not around people coming to your page and interacting with it”

Anyone who cares about this topic should read the entire VentureBeat article Q & A with RockYou — three hit apps on Facebook, and counting. And of course Jia is speaking at the upcoming Viral Marketing conference put on by Noah Kagan of CommunityNext.

To define the viral loop, you can think of it as:

The steps a user goes through between entering the site to inviting the next set of new users

Simple enough? Well, because this core loop is repeated so many times over generations and generations of users, getting it right is incredibly important.

What are some examples?
Let's look at some great examples of viral loops done right.

Slide.com

1. First off, the user will likely hit a MySpace page with the widget in place
2. If they like it, they will click and hit a landing page on Slide.com
3. The next step is to suck down the pics from their accounts, arrange/decorate them
4. Now when you hit "Save", it takes you to a page where you can upload your widget simply by putting in a MySpace username and profile (without leaving the site)
5. Then it immediately shows up, but not before the "Post a bulletin for all my friends" checkbox, which is defaulted to checked, fires off a bulletin to all your friends

In the scheme of things, Slide is great because the total number of pages you spend between clicking onto Slide and telling your friends is 3 pages at most. That's fantastic. And note the great use of AJAX which reduces the number of context-jarring pageview changes, but instead feels like a natural interaction. Honestly, I'm surprised that the entire set of pages isn't AJAX to make the experience that much smoother.

Now let's look at the viral classic, YouTube.

YouTube.com

1. Again, the first encounter will probably be a video embedded in a page
2. If they like it, at the end of the video there's an embed code that can be directly copied
3. Or, if they don't want to embed or e-mail that video, other videos are recommended at the end of the process so that people can try those, and potentially embed a different one

... and so on.

Building your own viral loop
Ultimately, viral loops are like induction proofs in that you are jumping to a steady state situation in which your viral widgets/emails/messages are already out there, and you are optimizing some set of steps that users have to jump through. Then, once you get this right, then you are figuring out how to build "on-ramps" into your viral loop so that you bootstrap the entire process.

1. What's your viral media?
The first (and last) choice you have to make is where people are going to receive an entryway into your viral loop. That might be e-mail, Facebook newsfeed, or blogs. The main factors to evaluate here are how difficult it is to integrate your entryway into their surface, and the response rate. The first factor, integration, is obviously important because a difficult integration means that perhaps fewer people will see your messages, or your messages will be filtered out altogether. The second factor, response rate, depends on how in-your-face your messages are (think Facebook invites versus e-mail spam), and how competitive the medium is. Obviously, viral marketing is about a compounding viral growth rate, and if your response rates are low, that will mean a huge difference in outcomes.

2. What's your funnel design?
The next choice to make is the design of your viral "funnel." First off, you want it to be short and as accessible as possible, since each page is a barrier you're asking your users to leap over. Assume up to 80% to 90% attrition if you are asking them to register for a username/password, for example. So if you can make it very short - 2-3 pages at most - with progressive commitment of personal information, you'll get further along in your design. And obviously, you'd ideally want to test for drop-off at each point, and optimize each step as if it were a landing page.

As stated above, viral growth rate is a compounding process, so the difference between a 80% dropoff and a 50% dropoff is huge spread over 1000s of viral loops.

3. What's the viral hook in your product?
Another important choice is product, of course. At the end of the day, a bad product can adversely affect your viral experience, because a poor slideshow (or a widget that no one wants) will lead to very few embeds. So picking something that is either a deep personal expression (music, avatars, slideshows, celebrity posters, etc) or a communication mechanism (voice messages, text, etc) are all great for getting people to WANT to put the apps on their homepages.

4. What are the onramps to your viral loops?
Once you're done with a very tight viral loop, then it's time to create the on ramps. In this case, you are looking at places like your website homepage, paid advertising, traditional marketing campaigns, SEO, etc, to create places where users can discover your viral loop and begin the process

That's it!
Those are the basics of thinking through a viral loop. The best way to understand them is to browse MySpace or get spammed by invites to social networks, and then break down exactly the "funnel" they are trying to put you through.

IMHO, Tagged.com has a fascinating one to analyze, since they won't even let you use the website without entering in your e-mail addressbook information. Definitely check out that one. They definitely short circuit the entire viral process by turning it from:

Register -> Use Product -> Evaluate Product -> Tell friends

to:

Register -> Tell friends -> Use Product -> Evaluate Product

In their case, it's really irrelevant how good the product is - instead, the focus is just on getting that viral loop to be fewer than 2 pages, and increasing your "branching factor" by using addressbooks rather than asking users to recall their friends' emails. Anyway, check that out and also try out some of the other very successful social networks.

See you at the conference!

Comments

[NIvi]

Andrew,

Please do me a favor and spread the term 'VMO' and tell everybody that me and Naval coined it, and that we are geniuses, and that no one is even worthy to hear the term, let alone understand it.

VMO = Viral Marketing Optimization.

:-P

[Charles Hudson]

This is a good framework for folks thinking about viral marketing. The only point I'd like to question is the wisdom in circumventing the loop you mentioned at the end of your post. The danger in being too aggressive in requiring effort from the user before he/she sees value is that you either a) alienate users who don't want to give before they've gotten something of value and b) you develop a reputation as being a "spammy" application by being too aggressive. I think Plaxo is a good example of the b) case and there are plenty of examples of the a) case that I won't mention.

There are plenty of applications which have driven virality by focusing on creating a product that people want to share with their friends and making it really easy to do so. This is especially true of applications where the consumer:producer ratio is quite high. Look at YouTube and Flickr - both have achieved scale with fairly benign approaches in terms of address book capture. In both cases, they made good products and made it easy to share content from their services.
Being really aggressive in forcing users to spread the word can certainly drive usage, but I question whether it can really drive ongoing usage unless the underlying product is something people really want to use anyway.

[Dave]

friggin awesome post.

[Matt]

Good stuff Andrew. You mentioned Tagged.com's funnel - I got "tricked" into registering for YouNoodle the same way. I just wanted to see why people were talking about me. After I was in the site I immediately sent out an email to a couple investor dudes and said, "keep an eye on this one."

[dave mcclure]

hah. right on target. just re-read this & saw the part about "induction proofs".

not even 24 hours ago, was just thinking about it the same way: "ok, so let's assume that you already got the app because you discovered it from a friend..."

felt exactly like the setup for inductive proof. i couldn't remember the exact term until you mentioned it, but i was thinking "something about this feels like math proofs or recursion... hmmm"

funny.

[john hui]

A lot of cool thoughts! What I doubt is that with so many websites out there, how often people are willing to recommend a site to their friends without even using it first?

[Ted Rheingold]

Brilliant. Makes me think a lot of Jeremy Liew's thoughts on knowing the gates in the widget adoption process and maximizing users' passage thru them.

I'm very regretful that we did not get to meet at CommunityNext. If you'd ever like to stop in the Dogster & Catster offices we'd love to have you.

Most respectfully,

[jovan jewett]

Just wondering, what's the point to this crap. It all just seems like a useless waste of time to me. If you can develop a useful product people will want it without trying to trick them.

[HaraldPlays]

Echo the previous comment. Ipod and Iphone are great examples of offline viral marketing. You'd think it'd be harder to go viral without an online component. But there it is: people love them, they look cool, and lots of people want them.

[Dr. Sanford Aranoff]

What is important is to know how to think. Thinking separates us from animals. See the new book on amazon.com: "Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better".

[Dr. Sanford Aranoff]

Let us not forget the importance of thinking. See the new book on amazon.com: "Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better".

[Dhruv]

I also think that people have become smarter than just giving you access to their address book without really trying out a product. Some new users might get caught in this trap. But if you're product doesn't cut it, eventually, that leaky bucket is going to catch up with your viral expansion.
For eg, Facebook is great product, so you want to tell other people about it. As is the case with Apple products.