How to drive traffic to your site by making the Facebook experience sticky and viral?

Question

I know some ways:

1. Make them sign up to our app. Every time they do something they post on their wall
2. Make them like our Facebook page. Every time we post something on that Facebook page, it shows up on their wall.

That's the 2 method I know.

Plain share or plain like seems to have very little viral and sticky value. They share once, and that's it. Most people don't even share. Am I wrong?

Answer 1

The "invite friends" feature of your Facebook app can be very powerful way to get something to "go viral".

Here is how it works:

1. Implement "invite your friends" through Facebook. (Note that users don't actually have to be signed up for your app for them to invite others. This means that you can do these invites to your app from your website.)

   https://www.facebook.com/dialog/apprequests?app_id=$appId&message=$message&redirect_uri=$whenDoneURL
   

2. After the user has invited friends, Facebook sends them back to the redirect_url with parameters stating how many friends they invited, and an "invitation id". You should store this information in your database.
3. When a friend clicks through to your app from this invitation, there will be parameters on the URL stating which invitation id it came from. You should log this information in your database.
4. Calculate your "viral coefficient" using this data. Your viral coefficient represents the average number of people each user convinces to visit your app.
5. Do usability testing to get your viral coefficient above "1". If users each invite more than one other user that visits, your app is "viral". Optimizations for this will include:
   • How compelling your content is (even good content can be improved for emotional respose.)
   • Prominence of the "invite friends" feature and how you push your users into using it.
   • How many friends users can invite (Facbook has limits on this per user per day, so you may have to have users do it each day until they have invited all their friends)