There are more than 3 billion mobile apps in both The App Store and Google Play. The competition is getting tougher and tougher by the minute, and how will YOU make your app well-known? Going viral means that your app is sharable, and is worth sharing. Everybody talks about it, and it’s all over social media. It’s safe to say that every mobile developer’s dream is for their app to become wide-spread. Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup, proposed a term “viral coefficient” which, if it’s greater than 1 it will lead to exponential growth, and a viral coefficient less than 1 will hardly lead to any growth. Below is the formula.

viral coefficient = (average number of users invited by each active user who invites someone) × (proportion of invited users who actually join or become active) × (proportion of active users who invite others)

However, Subramani and Rajagopalan (2003) mentions that, “there needs to be a greater understanding of the contexts in which viral marketing strategy works and the characteristics of products and services for which it is most effective. This is particularly important because the inappropriate use of viral marketing can be counterproductive by creating unfavorable attitudes towards products.” How will you do so? To give you a little push, here’s 3 ways to make your app get an edge over your competitors and go viral.

Simple and effortless UI

UI stands for user interface. Nowadays, it is important to find the middle of usefulness and design. No one wants a crammed app, not knowing the buttons do. The best app appears “effortless,” and it creates a flow in your app. To do so, you have to trim all the unnecessary “obstacles” and offer a quick and easily understandable interface. For example, social media sign-ins. It’s a click away from signing in, and the user doesn’t have to go through unnecessary username and password inputs. One more thing, put emphasis and effort in to the first screen user sees after logging in. Instead of leaving the user confused on what to do, give a hand and clearly show what you can do with the app and start sharing.

Rewards

If you want to encourage a user to share and spread their network, you should reward them for doing so. This isn’t anything special, its purely psychological. Us humans love rewards. For example, for every 5 friends a user invites and connects, he/she gets an extra theme. More example of rewards can be extra storage (tunnelbear.com does this), discounts, and so forth. Be creative with it!

Transparency & Privacy

Not only your app has to be valuable to share, but it has to keep transparency so your users has confidence in terms of privacy. This means that, after you implement social-media sign ins, be sure to add a little message above that says something along the lines of, “We won’t share anything on your timeline, promise!” and be sure to keep the promise. Always give your users control over what is being shared online. Even if it’s a killer app, it will never go viral if the company doesn’t keep their transparency.

Those were the 3 main tips on creating a viral app. However, before you consider any of these, be sure that you have a clever and well-thought design and an idea! Do you have any other tips? Be sure to comment below!

Sources:

Top 7 launch Tactics That Make Your Mobile App Go Viral at First Day | Credencys Solutions Inc. (n.d.). Retrieved April 23, 2016, from http://www.credencys.com/blog/Top-7-launch-tactics-that-make-your-mobile-app-go-viral-at-first-day.html

White, C. (2013, August 19). Key Ingredients To Make Your App Go Viral – Smashing Magazine. Retrieved April 23, 2016, from https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/08/key-ingredients-to-make-your-app-go-viral/

Leskovec, J., Adamic, L. A., and Huberman, B. A. 2007. The dynamics of viral marketing. ACM Trans. Web, 1, 1, Article 5 (May 2007), 39 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1232722.1232727 http://doi.acm.org/ 10.1145/1232722.1232727

In my previous blog post, I ranted how crucial it is to blog for your business. That may have convinced you to write one, but out of millions of bloggers out there, it’s extremely hard for yours to stand out in the crowd. But don’t panic! There are ways to make your blog attractive and compelling that readers can’t resist but read through. Here’s 3 easy ways you can do right now to attract readers to your blog.

Accurate title

People underestimate the title. A lot. Most bloggers focus on the content too much, and leave the title with minimal effort. However, people seem to forget that titles are what sell the content. It’s the first thing everyone sees on emails, social media, and search engines. No one would care to open your blog, no matter how great the content is if the title isn’t compelling enough.

Come up with an accurate, crafty title, thats very specific. For example, say you write a post called “Sports and Health Benefits.” This gives a sense of what the blog is about, but it’s not very specific. Instead, you can modify it and say “X Benefits Your Body Will Gain by Playing Sports.” In addition, being accurate and clarifying your blog will greatly increase your viewers, as it sets clear expectations for your readers. A study conducted by HubSpot concluded that headlines with clarification, such as [Infographic] and [Interview] at the end of the title performed 38% better than headlines without clarification. That’s an substantial amount considering how easy it is to implement. Also, keep the title short. Get to the point from the first word. According to HubSpot Analysis, headlines between 8-12 words got the most Twitter shares. For Facebook, lengths between 12-14 got the most likes.

Hook your readers

The first few sentences after the headline determines if your viewer is going to keep reading through the blog or simply close the tab. No one wants to read tedious blog posts that doesn’t address the problem and the solution until the very last. Introduction is the part which require the best writing. However, the good news is, it doesn’t have to be very long. It’s about 3-4 sentences long, and straightforward. Before you talk about the actual problem, start off by writing the general idea and the frustration the potential viewer is going through with the problem. Sympathizing with your viewer is crucial. Then, hint a solution. For example, you can say “But wait! Here’s X ways you can change that.” The sudden reveal that you have a solution to that specific frustrating experience will hook your readers to read on for sure.

Scannable content

In reality, its a rare case that a viewer reads the blog word for word. This is especially true in a very long blog post. Nobody got time for that. With millions of content produced every minute, we have been accustomed to separating the “noise” that has little to no advantage in reading and actual useful content. So what do most people do? They scan. You can’t expect your viewers to read your blog word for word. I will guarantee you that people will miss that crucial data of yours in the middle of a 1000 word blog. According to Site Meter, an average reader spends about 96 seconds reading the average blog. Thats a very short amount of time, especially if you have a lot to say in your blog. So what can you do? The solution is fairly simple, plan out your formatting. Format your blog so that crucial points in your blog is instantly found without focused reading. Take your time in creating clear headings and subsections, so your user can instantly access the details they want to know about.

Those were the 3 ways you can make your blog differentiate from standard blogs out on the internet. What about you? Do you have any tips on creating compelling content? Please leave a comment below!

Sources:

An, S. (2013, August 26). 5 Little known Secrets of Writing Compelling Blog Posts. Retrieved April 18, 2016, from http://www.shoutmeloud.com/secrets-writing-copelling-blog-posts.html

Iny, D. (2012, March 27). A Fool-Proof Formula for Easily Creating Compelling Content – Copyblogger. Retrieved April 18, 2016, from http://www.copyblogger.com/content-creation-formula/

Rowse, D. (2005, March 17). How Long Do Your Readers Stay at Your Blog – Length of Stay Statistics. Retrieved April 14, 2016, from http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/03/17/how-long-do-your-readers-stay-at-your-blog-length-of-stay-statistics/

Wainwright, C. (2016, February 23). How to Write Catchy Headlines and Blog Titles Your Readers Can’t Resist. Retrieved April 13, 2016, from http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/a-simple-formula-for-writing-kick-ass-titles-ht