App Growth Framework III: Discover How Viral Loop Works
This is the 3rd post in series of posts on mobile app growth framework I outlined here and here.
Key factors affecting the number of viral downloads are:
- Fraction of users who share — as you might notice from the diagram above typically only fraction of users decide to share/invite others into the app. One of the key factors is to increase this fraction. You should understand user’s motivations to share the word about your app, so I strongly recommend these 2 books: “Viral Loop” by Adam Penenberg and “Contagious” by Jonah Berger. Nevertheless there are some technical obstacles for people to share, so make sure you track errors and investigate this fraction thoroughly (see example how we discovered problems with iOS sharing)
- CTR of share/invite email or post — compare these 2 posts, which one makes you want to take action (retweet): left or right? Well, you can see the stats.
The difference is just that we used native Twitter photo sharing instead of just instagram-to-twitter share (my colleague Nikita shares more insights here or a great infographic “The Big List of 189 Words That Convert”)
3. Number of friends who notice share — you know that Facebook displays your posts only to 12% of your friends. So, assuming your average user has 150 friends in Facebook, one share is viewed by 18 friends. Any ideas how to improve that? There are lots of posts online on this matter (lots of posts online on this matter: e.g. here & there) and there used to by a great feature in Facebook to improve visibility of your app posts, but now it is, unfortunately to us, but fortunately to users, is gone.
4. Click-to-download ratio — this is something app developers usually forget about: users click on your invite/share only to find out that you don’t have Android version, for example. Or they click on desktop and step back since you will have to open iTunes, download the app, then synchronise apps with device (or try searching app store by app name). Couple of great strategies: a) implement pre-release sign-up forms, so you start collecting user emails and send them out the moment your Android app is released to get initial boost in downloads or b) implement “text me download link” feature as Booking.com recently did.
What other ways to improve these factors do you know? Let me know in comments and/or share this post if you like it ☺
