You have created great content that you want to spread as far and wide as possible. You are counting on your visitors to share your content on social media, and you have incorporated the ubiquitous share widgets on your web pages. But, do you know if it is working?
K-factor: the Original Measure of Viral Growth
In the pre-social days, the growth of websites was measured using the K-factor. K-factor is a well-known concept whose formula is defined as follows:
k = i * c
where
k is the K-factor
i is the number of invites sent by customers
c is the conversion rate (%) from each invite
When the K-factor is greater than 1, the website is considered to be viral, and its traffic grows exponentially. But the K-factor does not account for the impact of social media because interactions on social media such as likes, comments and retweets will not count as conversions even though they lead to traffic growth on the website.
Therefore, it is time for an update that more accurately measures the impact of social sharing.
Social K-factor: A More Accurate Measure
The Social K-factor is an indicator of how viral your website is because of social sharing. It is measured by calculating a Social Coefficient, which shows how quickly your content is spreading on social media.
The Social Coefficient is a function of three factors:
- The number of Posts (i.e. Shares) on social media channels
- The number of Clicks resulting from these Posts
- The number of Interactions from these Posts, which includes:
- likes /favorites
- shares/retweets, and
- comments on those shares
The Social Coefficient is a function of the above variables and can be defined as
S = fn (P, Cl, In)
where
P = # of Posts
Cl = # of clicks
In = # of Interactions
The higher your Social Coefficient, the faster and further your content goes on social media. The Social K-factor formula is defined as:
ks = s * c
where
c = the sharing ratio – rate at which visitors share a page, and
s = the Social Coefficient
IMPROVE YOUR SOCIAL K-FACTOR
Make It Easy to Share
As you can see above, the Social K-factor is a function of the Social Coefficient and the conversion rate. The Social Coefficient depends on the quality of the content, the visitors on your website, and their social influence. Therefore, the key to increasing your social factor is to optimize the sharing ratio, and here is what you need to do:
The first step is to make it easy to share your content. Your visitors may want to share to multiple networks, but first generation share buttons make it hard for you to do so by forcing the user to click through to each network. Worse, they often make the user log in to each network on every session.
Ease of sharing is also about allowing users to interact with your content on their terms. They may want to share content from a mobile device. They may want to share using browser plugins/addons/extensions. If your content is as easy to share across these (or any other) mechanisms, they are more likely to be shared.
If you reduce the friction inherent to the act of sharing, you will find more users sharing more content more often.
Engage With Your Sharers
First generation sharing widgets don’t offer any means to identify your visitors, let alone engage with them. But your visitors have already signaled willingness to identify themselves when they sign into the social networks. And having identified themselves once, should they have to keep signing in every time they want to share your content?
But it is not just about identification.
You should know what content interests your visitors. You should be curating your content to bubble up featured and/or trending pieces that they are likely to enjoy and share. Again, this needs to be a seamless experience from start to finish.
Incentivize Users to Share More
The New York Times published a comprehensive study about the psychology of sharing, in which it identified six different sharing personality types:
- Altruists – want to share valuable content with people that they care about.
- Careerists – want to develop their professional reputation.
- Hipsters – want to share because it is part of their identity and want to be connected with the world.
- Boomerangs – want to share and elicit a response.
- Connectors – want to remain connected with people they know.
- Selectives – want to share useful content with a specific set of people that they know will find the content useful.
In each of these cases, it is clear that sharers are looking for information about what happened with/to the content that they shared. In some of these instances, they can be incentivized to share, especially if you can show them how their social influence grows with their activity.
Track the Propagation of Your Content
As Alfred Sloan put it, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Do you know who your top influencers are? What are they sharing most? How often are they sharing content? What is happening on social networks after they share? Which networks are bringing you the most traffic?
Ultimately, this is what the Social K-factor boils down to – specific metrics that shed light on your top content and your top sharers. By matching your content to your influencers, you are on your way to a viral website.
