HOW TOMAKE OUR

APP GO

VIRALA presentation by Debasish Panda

WHAT IS VIRAL ?

• Virality is about interacting with people and enticing them to participate.

• It isn’t a marketing strategy that can be executed once our app gets launched.

• It has to be thought through and built into the app from the beginning.

TESTS OF VIRALITY

To succeed, our app must pass these four tests:• It must have something valuable to share.• It must make it easy for users to share and for friends

to join.• It must reward users for sharing and offer them

incentives to come back.• The more people use the app, the more value must

be created for them.

CONSIDERABLE QUESTIONS

• Does our app offer something valuable to share?• Is it worth being shared?• How will users be rewarded when they share?• Why will users want to share?• Why would they want their friends to share?• How will our app motivate users to keep sharing over

the long term?

TYPICAL VIRAL FLOW

The typical viral flow strategy of apps

• But this approach misses a lot of opportunities.• To go truly viral, we need to engage our audience.

Every time they use our app should build on the previous experience, so that they get more value out of our app. And as the audience grows, that value should just go up.

PRINCIPLES OF A VIRAL STRATEGY

• Principle 1: Make It Effortless

• Principle 2: Reward Often

• Principle 3: Give Users Control

• Principle 4: Keep Pulling Them Back In

• Principle 5: Be Useful to a Lone Person

Principle 1: Make It Effortless

• Offer one-click sign-in via Facebook or Twitter, rather than with a dedicated user name and password. This not only gets users registered quickly, but lets us tap into important data to grow the network.

• Display profile pictures of friends during authentication to increase their audience as well as ours.

• Motivate users on the first screen to get started by clearly showing how they can grow their network and start sharing.

• Prioritize what is on the screen, and show top actions right in view. Users need to know what they can do.

Principle 2: Reward Often

• Inviting friends and connecting with others should be a part of their daily usage.

• The number of users who each of our active users invites will determine our success.

• Experiment with ways to encourage customers to invite friends at different points in the app.

Rewards could be:• free themes• free upgrades• discounts

Principle 3: Give Users Control

• Be transparent about what is being shared.

• Always allow users to control what is shared. This can easily be done by including a settings screen with toggles for controlling the sharing options, like in Pinterest’s app.

Principle 4: Keep Pulling Them Back In

• Send users useful notifications that motivate them to return.• Keep sending them useful messages, as well as showing them

tips to encourage them to use your app. This should be a part of our core features.

• Give users control over what notifications they receive and how they receive them.

Principle 5: Be Useful to a Lone Person

• Our app should be of benefit to users, even without the social aspect.

• Most people won’t invite others to join the app unless they already know it’s good. To find that out, they have to road test it a few times first.

• Our app must have something meaningful for the user to do right away, without inviting friends. When our user base increases, the value of the app’s main function increases as well.

MORE ASPECTS• Our app should be Search Engine Optimized.• We can incorporate a chat forum or an instant messaging

service for easy communication between the users themselves.

• We can add gesture-driven functionality to our app, replacing the buttons, thereby simplifying the user experience to a great extent.

• We can add cross-platform compatibility to reach a larger audience.

CONCLUSION

We can’t make our app viral as an afterthought, but it has to be designed into the app’s core functionality and features.

We can do these things to improve our app’s chances of going viral:• Offer something meaningful to share.• Be transparent about what our app is sharing and whom it is

contacting.• Connecting with friends and inviting new users should be at

the core of our app.• Reward both our users and their invited friends for signing up.• Keep pulling users back with meaningful notifications, rewards

and promotions.• Be useful even to the lone user. This is the start of our viral

circle.

THANK YOU…