Everything you need to know about how to achieve virality

Key quotes:

• "One other key to word of mouth virality is making sure your product is easy to find later."
• "Musical.ly spreads in a similar way as users and influencers create very cool music videos and then share them on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and people decide to try Musical.ly to make their own."
• "Infectious virality is when a product is designed in a way that people will work to get other people using it because it will make it better for both of them."
• "When you understand the different tools and that they all work differently, you can design or build virality into your product in a way that’s very natural."
• "You don’t want to try infectious virality unless it really is applicable — that you want each user to bring another user into the product experience so that it will be better for both of them."
• "If your product is about creating content or having experiences that are easy to show off, it’s often much better to focus on demonstration virality."

Key quotes:

• "Together they shared the following 60 strategies to help your content go viral."
• "From this alone my site was visited hundreds of times, and I received over 30 emails and messages asking for investing advice, help and requesting to be on my “investing waitlist.” I’ve found telling your story through a genuine lens and posting in online forums such as Reddit to be a great source that drives new fans, customers and attention, great for any business to grow, and best of all, it doesn’t cost a dime."
• "Chris is also an expert graphic designer video maker and social media marketer, he also develops and executes promotional campaigns, videos, graphics for other artists and businesses to help them to reach more people."

Key quotes:

• "If we wanted to be viral, we needed to optimize every step so that as many users as possible would click on the viral message, land on the app, reach the viral point, and send a message to as many friends as possible."
• "You want users to share their interests with as many friends as possible for an app to spread virally."
• "You need to grab people’s attention, but without giving everything away in the viral itself: If you do, then why would people click on it? This is why you end up with headlines like this: This is pure clickbait: You grab people’s attention by completely overhyping your article in the headline, but once people have clicked, it turns out that that 5th sentence didn’t really end up blowing your mind."
• "The rules we’ve covered so far are focused on the high value side: (1) The product is the viral, (2) it has a high interest overlap, (3) it grabs attention, but (4) it doesn’t give everything away."
• "When crafting virals, always reflect: What will people want to share? Takeaway: You want to try to have virals that people feel comfortable sending to as many friends as possible."

Key quotes:

• "It’s hard to think about virality in abstract: Most people are only consciously aware of one or two products to which they’ve invited their friends."
• "You’ll often see tweets from Twitter embedded in news articles, and similarly it’s common to see YouTube videos on a variety of sites: Embeds also serve as an educational tool for potential users: Seeing examples educates them about the type of content that’s on your platform, the creators that are on it, and models the behavior of your platform to them."
• "For user-generated content (UGC) products, there exists an even more powerful viral channel than embeddable content: social sharing."
• "If your product creates uniquely interesting content, users can be encouraged to share it on their social networks, thus spreading knowledge of your product to their network."
• "By creating a URL that richly represents what your user wants to share, the product becomes viral as well."
• "Your product offers a differentiated type of messaging and encourages users to invite their friends to join them on the new messaging platform."

Key quotes:

• "So the cycle time is just how long it takes for a loop to happen."
• "Viral cycle time: The time it takes for a referral to turn into a customer The time to share is a function of the time it takes a user to: We will get into this in more detail in a blog I will write soon so if you want to learn more, wait for it! So the time from infection, to the human become a zombie, realising they like meat, want to eat people and start doing it needs to be a lot less, right? The friends might see the photos on Tabblo, and like the experience and decide that they would use the site the next time they took photos they wanted to share."
• "I know I have been talking shit about viral cycle time."
• "Like, if your K is greater than one (well the true K, adjusting for churn) and you have a low viral cycle time you can literally have everyone with a phone in the world playing zombie kill in a few days."
• "If your churn rate is not less than about 10% your viral cycle time does not matter at all!."