What is a pandemic?
Many of us learned the word Pandemic for the first time thanks to coronavirus and COVID-19. Pandemic is an outbreak of disease prevalent over the whole world. The H1N1 flu virus in 2009 is a good example of that. By contrast, the famous SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak in 2003 was an epidemic spread in Hong Kong and surrounding Cantonese regions. Similarly, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was considered an epidemic. The difference between a pandemic and epidemic is the size of its impact. Despite that, both words refer to an illness of similar nature and derived from a common source, in excess of what would be normally expected in a community or region.
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| A map of the coronavirus outbreak as of March 2020 |
How does "virality" look like?
Coronavirus is shutting the whole world down because it spreads more easily than other diseases. Because of that, we see the exponential growth in confirmed cases on COVID-19 when not enough measure was in place to stop the spread.
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| Hockey stick growth of COVID-19 |
TikTok is a great example of viral-content-enabled hockey stick growth. SensorTower reported over 700 million global downloads of TikTok, beating Facebook & Instagram in 2019.
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| The same hockey-stick growth seen on TikTok |
How to measure virality?
There is a way to calculate the virus’s basic reproduction number, or R0 — the number of people on average one infected person will pass the virus to. Coronavirus suggests a range of 2–2.5 in R0, exceeding seasonal flu in the range of 1-2.
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| R0 (Basic reproduction number) comparison on Coronavirus |
There is a similar metric to R0 in viral marketing called K-factor. The K-factor can be used to describe the growth rate of websites, apps, or a customer base. The formula is roughly as follows:
(e.g. if each new customer invites five friends, i = 5)
(e.g. if one in five invitees convert to new users, c = .2)
In the example above your K-factor is 1. The higher the K-factor, the higher the virality and the faster the product will grow in downloads or installs. Notice here I didn't say userbase instead - the reason being that active user base also highly depends on the effectiveness of user onboarding and retention, which we can cover in a different post.
(e.g. if each new customer invites five friends, i = 5)
(e.g. if one in five invitees convert to new users, c = .2)
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| 2019 Q4 global downloads of the top social apps |
Why is viral marketing so desirable?
Secondly, viral marketing success isn't limited to the size of your marketing budget as its outcome doesn't necessarily correlate to the amount of acquisition dollar put behind your campaigns and the spread of the content could be completely free or just slightly incentivized. Therefore it is more affordable.
Using TikTok as an example, they focused on short-form mobile videos. By providing users with tools to make impactful visual and sound effects, TikTok enables its users to easily create viral content. TikTok further makes it easy to share their videos on other social platforms with TikTok signature look and feel - Douyin, TikTok's Chinese version also includes a sound signature in each video. When users share TikTok content, they are building mindshare in their community about the TikTok brand. With more and more social influencers getting onto the platform, their fans follower their footsteps to adopt the app. What a powerful way to grow a product!
Final words
Now that you've learned that every person who contracted COVID-19, with or even without symptoms, may pass the virus on to two or more people, are you finding yourself better at keeping social distance, washing hands often and not touching your face?
Are you interested in learning more about viral marketing? Is viral marketing for everyone? How to construct a successful viral marketing strategy? How to measure k-factor if your budget doesn't allow you to pay for those expensive attribution tools? Let me know if you're interested in learning more and I will follow up with more posts on this topic!
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