Here’s a simple fact about human nature: The better something makes someone look, the more likely they are to share it.
You probably noticed this on your Instagram feed at the end of last year, when a metric ton of your friends shared their Spotify Wrapped playlist.
What makes sharing the Spotify Wrapped playlist so irresistible?
Well, we just love talking about ourselves. On average, people spend 60% of conversations talking about themselves. On social media, that number jumps to 80%.
Sharing our “year in music” is a way of bragging to the world about our unique and awesome taste. (Yes, I am in the top .05% of Taylor Swift listeners.)
But when we have to talk about something other than yours truly, the 100 million subscriber question is how do you make content (and products and campaigns) that people can’t resist sharing?
1. Make your customers/audience feel like insiders.
You know that friend who’s in every craft brewery Mug Club in town? Or the coworker who flaunts their airline status on Monday mornings following their weekend in St. Bart’s/Miami/Omaha?
People looooove to signal that they’re part of something exclusive, and creating the appearance of exclusivity makes people more likely to share just how exclusive they truly are.
Take Chief, for example. Chief is a private membership club for female executives. Chief is exclusive: They have a rigorous interview process, and even when invited, membership costs more than $5,000 a year. Once accepted, members have one week to claim their spot, or it goes to someone else.
Who wouldn’t want to share with their networks that they were accepted into this exclusive club? And people do.
The takeaway: Create the apparance of exclusivity and scarcity around your product, and reinforce it by giving members high-quality, shareable tokens of their membership.
2. Inspire friendly competition for people to see where they stand compared to others.
People don’t just care about their own status. They care about their status compared to other people.
This is why leaderboards are so effective. They allow people to share something that says: “I’m not only good – I’m better than everyone else.”
To know if you should create a leaderboard, ask two critical questions:
- Is this a metric that your users actually care about?
- Does sharing it make people look good?
Take, for example, the New York Times Mini Crossword Leaderboard. People might not care much about their times out of context, but when they can see them in comparison to others, they definitely want to brag about it.
The Mini Crossword Leaderboard works in three very effective ways:
- People who play Mini Crossword share their results because they want to show how good they are.
- Those players also encourage others to join the leaderboard, to further prove their own supremacy.
- People who don’t play are made aware of the game, and want to prove that they could actually take the top spot if they played.
The takeaway: Help your products go viral by creating competition around metrics that a) users care deeply about and b) make them look good to others.
3. Identify a specific feature that makes your product worth talking about.
The final step to making things go viral is finding your product’s “inner remarkability.”
Now, this probably seems easy if you work for Tesla or Lululemon – companies where the pioneering nature and high quality of the product speak for itself.
But what about for – well – boring products? You just have to ask two questions:
- What does your product do really, really well?
- How can you show that feature rather than telling people about it?
Take Blendtec. They’re a blender company, hardly the most exciting product on the market. But they achieved virality by doing something very simple: making a video of an iPhone being blended into powder.
This video has 12 million views. And it cost less than $50 to make (except for the cost of some poor person’s iPhone).
Takeaway: Figure out one thing your product does really, really well, and find a visually engaging way to show people that feature.
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