Virality Equation as a Growth Hacking Strategy

In the startup world, growth is typically the most important variable. It’s even more important than short term profit. In fact, many ambitious startup companies would operate for several years at a loss only to fuel the constant growth of the company.

When it comes to the individuals who handle the bulk work, encouraging growth, whether that be an improvement in business operation or an increase in brand awareness, is an ongoing work. For the social media manager, growth essentially means reaching more people and increasing engagement at an exponential pace. This aim has turned so important that online managers have reintroduced the term “viral” or “virality” or “viral marketing” as the recipe for success.

Viral marketing is a concept that refers to a business experiencing hyper-growth. It’s a promise to take the company to exponentially high growth levels at a lesser period of time. In the social media spectrum, viral marketing focuses on producing content that results in unusually high engagement rates as compared to the average engagement rates in general. Through a “snow-ball” effect, viral posts score tremendous reach and engagement rates, thus turning the producing brand into a hit.

Even though many recognise the importance of viral content, few are able to produce original viral content or reproduce the steps needed to create such content. This happens because of a lack of proper care in this area or because of a lack of understanding of the process. The care or investment is often up to the company executives but the understanding of viral marketing is up to the marketers.

Many have analysed the factors that contribute to a content gone viral. After such studies, we can agree that virality (v) is influenced by four factors:

• Initial Reach of your communication (I).
• The chance of a reshare from those people who see your initial communication (β).
• The reach of each of those reshares (λ).
• The Conversion Rate of each of the people who have seen your content because of a reshare (C).
• With these factors established, here is how “Virality” would appear as a dependent variable in a simple multivariable equation:

V= i x βx λx C

With work in four fronts, a marketer can actually discover the “El-Dorado” of marketing. Yet, much depends on the human element of content production. Virality is essentially a good anomaly. Even with this thorough understanding of its nature, the people who strive in this field are often those with no direct intention to achieve viral success.

By Kreshnik from AGOG Marketing