How To Build a Viral Loop (Using Mathematics)

Knowing how to engin­eer a vir­al loop is a PR superpower.

In this art­icle, I’ll run the num­bers of a vir­al loop to help you con­struct your traffic-gen­er­at­ing machines.

As a digit­al strategist, I’ve designed many vir­al loops to gain trac­tion and gen­er­ate leads for B2C and B2B brands. Viral loops are power­ful, but they also break easily.

Here we go:

How To Determine Virality

Let’s say you post a hil­ari­ous cat video on YouTube. 

You share your cat video across social media and get your first 1,000 views. Out of those 1,000 view­ers, 10% (100 people) decide to share your cat video with their friends — once on aver­age. Each such share gen­er­ates 11 new video views, a total of 1,100.

Going from 1,000 views (1^st cycle) to 1,100 unique views (2^nd cycle) equals a vir­al coef­fi­cient of 1,1.

And any­thing above 1,0 = vir­al, woohoo!

How many views will you get in the 3^rd cycle? Out of the 1,100 people in the 2^nd cycle, 10% will share it once, gen­er­at­ing on aver­age 11 new views per share and — boom! — you get 1,210 (1,100 x vir­al coef­fi­cient) addi­tion­al views after the 3^rd cycle.

Look at your cat video now, oh mighty Viral Loop Designer!

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s exam­ine the inner work­ings of a vir­al loop.

Viral Loop Weaknesses

Why aren’t all spin doc­tors involved in design­ing vir­al loops? Well, as it turns out — it’s chal­len­ging to get vir­al loops to work. 

Here are some vari­ables to consider:

Population Size

We can only expect your con­tent to per­form as long as you reach your tar­get audi­ence. Cat videos have an extens­ive appeal across demo­graph­ics, so your pop­u­la­tion size will be enormous!

But most busi­nesses have very little to do with cats. 

For instance, if you’re a CRM SaaS com­pany, you’ll prob­ably struggle to reach crit­ic­al mass for your cycles.

Loop Instability

By cal­cu­lat­ing aver­ages with­in each cycle, you might find some­what stable inputs for click-through rates (CTR), con­ver­sion rates, social back traffic, etc. 

But in real­ity, these indic­at­ors are volat­ile, and they fluc­tu­ate immensely from cycle to cycle.

Getting your 2^nd cycle to per­form above 1,0 (vir­al coef­fi­cient) is often a chal­lenge, and it gets more com­plic­ated with each cycle.

Engagement Distribution

A key factor is social back traffic from people shar­ing your content. 

This aver­age traffic num­ber can be deceiv­ing; most shares hardly res­ult in any back traffic. It’s often shar­ing that keeps the aver­age up.

The Engagement Pyramid

The 1% rule of online engage­ment was mainly an urb­an legend on the inter­net. However, a peer-reviewed paper from 2014 con­firmed the 1% rule of thumb. ¹Trevor van Mierlo. (2014). The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 16(2), e33 – e33. … Continue read­ing

Active pub­lics dis­trib­ute them­selves in a way proven sci­en­tific­ally by soci­olo­gists — long before the inter­net and social media emerged. 

The engage­ment pyr­am­id divides pub­lics into three dis­tinct groups:

When study­ing inter­net for­ums spe­cific­ally, it’s not uncom­mon to find that 90% of users have nev­er pos­ted (lurk­ers), 9% are adding only to exist­ing top­ics and threads (con­trib­ut­ors), and 1% are act­ively start­ing new sub­jects and threads (cre­at­ors).

The engage­ment pyr­am­id is some­times called the 1% rule or the 90−9−1 principle.

“The 90−9−1 prin­ciple and Zipf’s Law both effect­ively clas­si­fy mem­bers in online sup­port groups, with the Zipf dis­tri­bu­tion account­ing for 98.6% of the vari­ance.”
Source: Internet Interventions ²Carron-Arthur, B., Cunningham, J., & Griffiths, K. (2014). Describing the dis­tri­bu­tion of engage­ment in an Internet sup­port group by post fre­quency: A com­par­is­on of the 90−9−1 Principle and … Continue read­ing

Learn more: The Engagement Pyramid (The 90−9−1 Principle)

Creators and con­trib­ut­ors tend to inter­act more, so you’re likely to run out of shares much more quickly than social shares from lurkers.

Cycle Times

YouTube is very friendly to vir­al mechanics: 

You watch a short video, share it, and the next cycle kicks in — often in minutes. Actually, from a math­em­at­ic­al stand­point (see math­em­at­ic­al for­mula), cycle time truly mat­ters more than social back traffic averages!

If you need someone to review a 30-page white­pa­per on SlideShare before being ready to share the con­tent, you might be facing an aver­age cycle time of sev­er­al hours (or even days). 

Reducing vir­al loop cycle time has, by far, the most sig­ni­fic­ant effect on vir­al growth.

External Factors

Your cat video isn’t the only social object com­pet­ing for people’s atten­tion. It’s impossible to fully con­trol or anti­cip­ate what con­tent will com­pete for atten­tion at any giv­en time.

We’re deal­ing with chaos the­ory here: There are too many unknown vari­ables to find, under­stand, and com­pute, from the ana­tomy of com­plex net­works to the slight­est details affect­ing indi­vidu­al behaviour.

Content Quality

Producing con­tent that inspires the kind of math dis­cussed above is quite chal­len­ging. With unlim­ited mar­ket­ing budgets, you might be able to enrol a team of world-class cre­at­ives with an organ­iz­a­tion of pro­duc­tion pro­fes­sion­als to match. But there are no guarantees.

Hundreds of thou­sands of tal­en­ted (or lucky) people are launch­ing attempts at vir­al con­tent every day. Can you be sure to beat them all at a time of your choosing?

Still hungry for vir­al suc­cess? What we want is to apply the vir­al loop to business.

Viral Project Economics

We could go on to cre­ate a “cat video,” mean­ing a video that’s cute and funny to a large num­ber of people and thus aim for the same math as described above and, for the sake of argu­ment, reach 1,000,000 views on YouTube. 

If the total pro­duc­tion cost (includ­ing pro­mo­tion costs) is $250,000 and the com­pany’s aver­age profit mar­gin is $50 per unit sold, a 1,000,000-view video that con­verts new cus­tom­ers at 0,01% (not uncom­mon) will gen­er­ate $5,000. And that is not great for a $250,000 video.

Also, if the busi­ness can man­age 1,000,000 video views on YouTube, how can any­one be sure that every­one watch­ing is poten­tial cus­tom­ers — and noth­ing else? There are oth­er ways for a vir­al video to cre­ate value bey­ond dir­ect sales:

Still, “money in the bank” should always be an essen­tial con­sid­er­a­tion. And there’s always the chance that your vir­al mech­an­ics fail.

Boosting Your Viral Loop

We’ll need all the help we can get. Let’s explore a quick over­view of help­ful vir­al tools:

Seed traffic. The 1^st wave of traffic you gen­er­ate, either by activ­at­ing your exist­ing audi­ence, through influ­en­cer out­reach, or advert­ising. (Must reach crit­ic­al mass for the vir­al effects to be giv­en a chance to come into effect.)

Landing page. A page designed spe­cific­ally to har­vest a spe­cif­ic intent. Typical for land­ing pages is that they only have one call-to-action (CTA).

Types of Landing Pages

Here are a few examples of dif­fer­ent land­ing page types:

Each land­ing page type serves a spe­cif­ic pur­pose in the cus­tom­er jour­ney, focus­ing on a single object­ive: increas­ing con­ver­sions by har­vest­ing demon­strated user intent.

Only your ima­gin­a­tion will determ­ine what types of effi­cient land­ing pages you can develop!

Read also: Types of Landing Pages

Lead mag­net. “Free” online con­tent encour­ages poten­tial cus­tom­ers to opt in. Efficient lead mag­nets tar­get urgent needs that can be relieved quickly. (Also known as “opt-in bribes.”)

Uptick page. If you can get a per­son to take action, you’ve “primed” them. So, instead of let­ting them go, you can refer them to an uptick page where you can make an addi­tion­al ask of them.

Uptick bonus. Lead mag­nets tailored expli­citly for spe­cif­ic con­tent types are often called “con­tent upgrades.”

Referral engine. Often com­bined with uptick pages, refer­ral engines encour­age users to share more than once, often using a gen­er­at­or for unique URL addresses.

If you’re look­ing for ready-made tools, LeadPages with tem­plates for high-con­vert­ing land­ing pages could be a place to start. If you’re look­ing for uptick pages with built-in refer­ral engines, check out UpViral.

Viral Loops Step-by-Step

Let’s build an ima­gin­ary vir­al loop for the Doctor Spin blog, shall we?

Step 1. The seed traffic (some Facebook ads tar­geted at a lookalike audi­ence based on exist­ing email sub­scribers) is dir­ec­ted to a land­ing page. If your brand already has crit­ic­al mass, that helps, too.

Step 2. The traffic is offered a “free” (in exchange for their email addresses) lead mag­net (a three-day video course that tar­gets an urgent pain point, like “How to Succeed with Content Marketing in B2B”). Three con­sec­ut­ive videos allow for three sep­ar­ate uptick pages.

Step 3. On the 1^st uptick page, the con­ver­ted users get the first video and are incentiv­ized to share my land­ing page with an uptick bonus (“Free Templates for Creating High-Converting Blog Posts and Landing Pages for B2B”). In this example, the user will get the bonus by refer­ring at least three friends to the ini­tial land­ing page. A refer­ral engine, gen­er­at­ing unique URLs for each user, keeps track.

Step 4. On day two, I use their email addresses to remind all signups that the fol­low­ing video is live on the 2^nd uptick page. Once there, they are reminded again to share the uptick bonus.

Step 5. On day three, I again reminded the signups via email that the final video is live on the 3^rd uptick page. Once there, they are reminded to share the uptick bonus a third time.

For the sake of argu­ment, let’s say that I send 1,000 poten­tial cus­tom­ers to my lead page, con­vert­ing at 40%, in turn send­ing 400 people to the uptick pages, con­vert­ing at an aver­age of 20%. The most act­ive users like the videos and the uptick bonus (I hope!) enough to share them 1,5 times on aver­age at 10 new land­ing page vis­it­ors per share.

And so on.

Non-Viral Loops Have Value, Too

No vir­al loop lasts forever, of course. But hope­fully, this the­or­et­ic­al exper­i­ment demon­strates the raw power of vir­al loops. Three uptick pages are presen­ted sequen­tially using a land­ing page, an email remind­er func­tion, a refer­ral engine with unique URLs, a lead mag­net, and an uptick bonus.

When deal­ing with small pop­u­la­tion sizes (often for niched products or ser­vices), you must make sure to sus­tain your vir­al loop.

My favour­ite vir­al loop is that of Instagram:

When you take a pic­ture, Instagram allows you to edit and apply vari­ous fil­ters. When you engage in this activ­ity, you become cre­at­ively more attached to the image — it becomes more than a pic­ture; it becomes some­thing you’ve cre­ated. Social net­works are vir­al spe­cial­ists. It’s in their DNA, their busi­ness, to activ­ate online users. Doing it your­self for your busi­ness can be daunting.

Even if you only man­age to estab­lish a vir­al coef­fi­cient of 0,5 (and only keep it for a few cycles), these con­ver­sions might still make a big dif­fer­ence to your ini­tial mar­ket­ing effort — remem­ber the seed traffic?

Using Facebook Ads to pay for 1,000 click-throughs and adding a “0,5 loop” will con­sid­er­ably increase your ROI for the ini­tial ad buy. There’s no “free traffic,” but this is close.

Example (“0,46” loop):

In real­ity, for your type of busi­ness, trans­form­ing an exist­ing “0,5 loop” into a “1,1 loop” might be near impossible (and expensive). 

However, adding “0,5 loops” here and there might be straight­for­ward and cost-effi­cient — while doub­ling your mar­ket­ing ROI. The vir­al effect isn’t a bin­ary phe­nomen­on. Instead of think­ing of a “0,5 loop” as a failed vir­al loop, you should think of it as an online mar­ket­ing amplifier.

Not bad for a funny cat video.

PR Resource: Why We Share on Social Media

Why We Share on Social Media

“People want to be loved; fail­ing that admired; fail­ing that feared; fail­ing that hated and des­pised. They want to evoke some sort of sen­ti­ment. The soul shud­ders before obli­vi­on and seeks con­nec­tion at any price.”
— Hjalmar Söderberg (1869−1941), Swedish author

When we share on social media, we share for a reas­on. And that reas­on typ­ic­ally has some­thing to do with ourselves:

If you can get social media to work for you, great. But you should also be mind­ful not to let the pres­sure get the bet­ter of you.

“A status update with no likes (or a clev­er tweet without retweets) becomes the equi­val­ent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewrit­ten. And so we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to con­form to the opin­ions of those around us.”
— Neil Strauss, Wall Street Journal

Learn more: The Narcissistic Principle: Why We Share on Social Media