3 insights on boosting virality on iOS
As you might know, as soon as your product hits basic traction, you need to work on viral part, since this is what heavily drives users to your app. This is what we were doing for last 3 months and managed to improve k (virality coefficient) 2x times.
Let me share some of the findings and insights we had as we analysed and improved our metrics
Native iOS share
The number one thing we decided is to implement native iOS share — this way we would simplify the basic act of sharing. We did it, released the update and you know what? The actual share of people sharing has dropped! We could not believe it! We spent days trying to figure our why this happened…
The insight came when I was checking the app on my girlfriend’s iPhone: I tapped the share button and saw no Facebook share in native share dialogue! What the hell? How did that happen? It turned out that you don’t see Facebook/Twitter share options in native dialogue if you haven’t added Fb/Tw account in device settings! So people would share, but could not, since there was no option! It turned out that lots of people DO have Facebook account, but DO NOT enter it in their iPhone settings.
Instagram and WhatsApp
Another thing we noticed that adding Instagram and WhatsApp to the list of channels to share your flight details to has significantly improved our k. Currently these 2 social networks drive 40% of downloads we have. And of course we will expand the channels (take a look at recent Business Insider’s report on fast-growing messaging services). Of course you would need some pretty pictures, so let me show you the ones we have (although they are not perfect…yet):
6 honest serving-men
One day I was reading Kipling’s poem “I keep six honest…”:
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
and I was like: “Hey, why don’t we try this ‘framework’ to help us in improving virality?!”. So our data scientist Nikita and I decided to apply these questions to our case. This generated lots of insights, which later we converted to actions and eventually results. One of them, the most interesting for us, but really obvious as soon as you hear it (it always happens like that ☺): that WHAT and WHERE people share really depends on WHEN. It turned out that our users tend to share flight details to Calendar/Reminders 2–3 weeks before the flight, while they share to Facebook/Instagram one day before or right on the departure day (thus making their friends jealours ;-)
This insight helped us understand our user’s behaviour and plan some product changes that we’ll introduce soon.
Overall, these are just some insights, and this is my first post — so let me know if you’d like me to continue sharing our insights on growth hacking and product management.
P.S. If you liked this post then try out our app “App in the Air” available for all major mobile platforms.
P.P.S. By the way, I am Bayram, CEO of App in the Air.
