Viral Loop (2/4) - How It Works

This post is part of 4-part series to explain the viral loop concept, written about in Adam Penenberg’s Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. This is a must read for anyone interested in this powerful, FREE customer acquisition channel.

In part 1, we talked about What's a Viral Loop? and highlighted examples of successful viral loops, plus described the common characteristics found in a viral loop. In this post, we are going to illustrate how a viral loop works, so you can learn how to implement one for your social community.

How It Works

Viral Loop Example

This diagram illustrates a typical example of how a viral loop works. Many have coined this as "invite-a-friend", "tell-a-friend", "refer-a-friend", "social invite", "viral invite", but they all pretty much mean the same thing. This is a common viral loop found on many social networking or community sites.

Here's how it works:

1. Call-to-Action: Every viral loop starts out with a call-to-action (CTA) - a compelling reason why users would want to invite their family, friends, colleagues in the first place. Typically, this would be to join your community as a new user. Other examples could be to share interesting content, or refer to a product to purchase. The sky's the limit for what's the right CTA. Whatever it is, make sure it's something people will want to act on and share with others.


2. Import Contacts: Once you have come up with a strong CTA, you will want to allow your users to create their own guest list. To do this, you will need to import their contacts from their favourite address book using a service like CloudSponge.com. Once you have imported contacts, you may also want to allow users to pick and choose contacts, rather than adding the entire list of contacts.


3. Send Invites: Now that your users have their guest list, it's time to send an invitation. You will want to have a short message explaining why the guest is receiving the message along with a link to the CTA. Depending on the contacts imported and the CTA, this invite could be in the form of an email, Twitter update, or Facebook status update.


4. Accept: Once a guest receives the invite, they must choose whether or not to act on it. If they accept and respond to the CTA, congrats! - you have a viral loop. The more invites and responses you get, the more new users you can expect to add to your community.

So, there you have it - a simple viral loop anybody could implement for their community site. In our next post, we will talk about a viral coefficient - a key performance measure to evaluate your viral loop and predict future user growth.

Stay tuned...