Message Crossover in Viral Marketing

Viral marketing has the potential to create high levels of exposure very quickly. The question is how much traffic can businesses really generate through viral marketing and what are some of the obstacles they have to worry about to keep their viral strategy alive? They are willing to acknowledge that if they can’t get the message to be accepted by their own followers on a social network, it won’t go viral. The problem is, many marketers forget that in order for viral marketing to work the message must be passed well beyond the original recipients.

They fail to consider what has to happen when the message is being sent to the next recipient. It is a common mistake to believe that if they pass a message along to enough people it will be passed on to the rest of the network or beyond as long as those recipients have a lot of friends of their own.

There is a major reason why this approach doesn’t always work as well as planned. The same people could be sending the message to each other over and over again. This becomes a problem when the originators of the message are in a group where everyone seems to know each other and doesn’t have anyone new to distribute the message to. Many people plan their viral marketing campaign thinking that if they have 50 followers who each have 50 followers of their own, they can easily receive an additional 2,000 receivers.

This sounds like a logic way to plan a viral campaign. The problem is that many of these followers could all be following each other as well. Let me trivialize this example a bit and suggest that within a social network there was a very close nit community that was made of almost exclusive mutual friends and followers. If someone shared a message and requested it be passed along, they would just have created a situation where 50 people were telling each other the same thing over and over again (unless of course they had the capability to filter out such repetitive messages which is possible on Facebook and many other social networks). Even without filters, such a small group of people would not keep sending the same message with each other so redundantly.

The original person would send it one time and no one would bother sending it again. Why would they need to if everyone they knew had already seen it? After all, would there be a point in executing a viral marketing campaign in this circumstance? It would really make much more sense to just email those people the message because you would know that no one else would be able to receive it anyways.

Some communities such as Facebook may find the problem associated with repetitive messages to be more of a problem than others. People are more likely to only accept friends they know in the real world so they are likely to share many of the same friends on a second or third-tier level. The salvation of viral marketing seems to be that people are often willing to expose their profiles to complete strangers on social networks and may even accept suggestions from people they have never met.
In order for viral marketing to work effectively, it is necessary to operate in a social media environment where there is fresh blood to keep the message alive. This way, people can ensure that their followers will redistribute the message to new prospects so that the miracles of viral marketing can help spread it throughout the world.