The Viral Growth Model and Viral Growth Curve

How to Design Your Viral Growth Abilities

Believe it or not, viral growth does not happen by chance. The key exists in designing growth hooks for your visitors through engagement and increasing their overall experience. Here is an explanation of the viral growth model and how to use it to increase your virality.

Viral Growth Formula

How is viral growth calculated? Understanding the coefficient of the product will help you use this formula. This is defined as K in the below formula.

{ K = I * conv% }

• K is equal to each user you have and how many new ones they create.
• I is equal to the number of invitations each user sends out in one cycle of the loop.
• Conv% is equal to the rate at which invitations convert into new users.

Are you going somewhere?
Yes – When K > 1
No – When K < 1 Example for Using Formula
50 Users on site.
10 Invites made per user.
15% conversion rate whereas each user creates 1.5 new users.
K = 1.5

Result: Your user base is able to increase exponentially and therefore enhance your ability to move through the loop and grow virally. As a result of generating newly engaged user, others will most likely be invited whereas older inactive users tend to no longer participate. Viral growth depends on a fresh supply of new users willing to participate and share with others.

Improving Your K

By focusing on improving your K, you are improving your viral growth opportunities. One way to do this is to increase the number of invites sent per user. Making invitations a core part of the visitor experience while offering rewards to users. Keep invitations front and center while making it easy for them to friend you easily in large numbers.

Another way to improve your K is to improve the conversion of invites. Test your invite and call to action. Test different formats for delivering such as through social methods, email, or SMS. Test reminder emails and incentives for signing up.

Increase Your Viral Loop

Understanding the cycle of the viral loop is one of the most important aspects of it. Formulas can be perceived as complicated and difficult to understand, but spending time on your viral loop and increasing its speed, can supply you with just as many positive results.

{ Users(t) = Users(0) * [{K(t/ct +1) – 1}/(K-1)] }

• Users(0) is equal to your original user base.
• Users(t) is equal to the total users at any given time.
• T = time in days
• K = Viral coefficient (solved for above).
• Ct = time it takes to complete one pass through the viral loop.

Increase Your Viral Speed

To increase your speed, there are multiple design elements that you can use to encourage repeated visitors. Some pertinent options include offering updates and notifications to their email, engagement in light activity, and maintain informed with what’s new and going on.

Making your site easy to access and navigate. This will allow your visitors to locate new and interesting posts. By allowing embeddable content, sharing is made easy for sites such as YouTube and SlideShare. Including social share buttons, you can allow for simple forwarding and cross posting to large sites.

Offer rewards for referrals and sharing such as sites like Dropbox that allow you to earn free space. Create a call to action so friends will share with others and gain status through referrals.

Create a Value Proposition

Keep in mind that effective viral elements must create value for both the inviting user and recipient. If this is not present, than your virality is just considered more spam to others. Simply focusing on increasing your virality, does not guarantee viral growth. This happens when there is no strong reason present for others to share.

Questions to Ask Yourself

• How can a user create content that reaches non-users?
• How does a user’s experience get better the more people they’re connected to on your service?
• How does a user benefit from reaching out to a non-user?
• What proportion of growth do I get from viral channels compared to others?

Now that you understand the key components to viral growth, you can better gauge your strategies while generating your content. Determine how and if viral growth of any sort will best align with your value proposition and identify the parts where your users get engaged the most. Be sure to create test spots and design changes to measure their impact on your growth.