How much do you know about viral transmission?

What do Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Dropbox, and Skype all have in common? In addition to being very successful, perhaps their common feature is the ability to use effective viral marketing in fast-growing processes.

As for how these companies do it, look at the following eight ways.

1. Innate propagation characteristics (inherent virality)

This is the most primitive kind of viral transmission, can be called word-of-mouth effect. Simply put, if your product is good enough, it will naturally turn your users into "communicators." Although the initial effect of this transmission is not obvious, but after a period of time, there will be explosive growth, Skype is the most typical example. Of course it works best, but it's also harder to achieve.

2. Synergistic effect Propagation (collaboration virality)

This communication means that although a product is valuable to a single user, the more users he or she recommends to use the product, the greater the value that the product will produce to him, and then the user will form a viral spread. For example Dropbox, you can use Dropbox to store files, but if you can share files with others, Dropbox will give you greater value.

3. Communication effect Communication (communication virality)

This situation usually occurs in the communication tool. With some kind of communication tool (such as Mail), a name often appears in the communication process, and people will remember the brand as time passes. For example, use a tool to regularly, mass, set the object of sending mail or micro-blog, people receive the content of the end will often be "sent by XX tool" similar annotation, so that people will inadvertently remember this product. This is also a viral spread, just as you often see "from Fawave" and "from 36 Krypton" under someone else's microblog.

4. Incentive effect Propagation (incentivized virality)

This is actually very simple. For example, when you invite other people to join in a website, the system will give you a reward, just as Dropbox will give you more space and some games will give you gold coins. This strategy is simple, but it will work, as long as you don't make the original user feel sick about it.

5, implantable transmission (embeddable virality)

This viral marketing is ideal for content sites, such as articles, videos, information, etc. In these content, the originator will put the original information into, so no matter how the content spread, original information will be users see. It looks like "soft", but it's not really a soft text. The simplest example is the "video advertisement", which is now flooded, preceded by a sense of moving, well-made short stories, and finally an irrelevant brand name (of course, there are some ads associated).

6. Signature propagation (Signature virality)

As the name suggests, it is the final addition of a signature in the communication ontology. The most common example is when you do an online survey, and finally generate a survey report, there is usually a "from XXX survey site." Or when you see the information map, there will be a "this information map of the Chinese from 36 Krypton" small icon.

7. Social communication (Social virality)

This communication relies on existing social networks, and when users use the product, the social network propagates the relevant information to other users, either implicitly or implicitly. For example, the largest social networking game in the United States, Zynga, is this way, when you play a game, other friends will receive the information you are playing the game, so that the speed of attracting new users will be faster. So, that's why a lot of websites are going to authorize registered accounts through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

8. Topic Communication (Pure Word of mouth virality)

Note that this is not a mere word of mouth effect. Of course, there are some factors of word-of-mouth effect, but not all of them. Topic communication refers to people willing to discuss this product or related events. For example, your product is really cool, or there is a topic worthy of discussion, people will remember your product or related information in the discussion. But the effect is hard to quantify, because if the topic is just a gossip about the founder of the product, it's hard to know how many people will use your product for this gossip. The last thing to note is that there are good and bad topics. If you're creating a negative topic, it's not viral marketing, it's a PR crisis.

How to quantify viral transmission

Having said the above eight ways of viral transmission, how can we quantify it? The most lazy and smartest advice is--don't quantify it.

But if you really want to calculate the effect of this transmission, first you need to know a value: "Viral factor" (virality coefficient). People who are generally aware of viral marketing will know that when the viral factor is >1, it is the real viral transmission, because the result is that your number of users will be exponentially increased.

In addition to the "viral factor", many people tend to overlook another important factor: the "propagation cycle" (the cycle time), when a user completes a virus-spread. Because that is the virus coefficient is 1.5, if the transmission cycle is 1 days and 2 days, the future will also appear a huge difference.

Looking at the formula given by David Skok of Matrix Ventures, you might know how to calculate it. The k in the figure is the "viral factor", and the CT is the "propagation cycle".