Posted by Ferol in There’s lots of people out there who want to know how to make something “go viral”. I can be certain that I don’t know how to do it, and I’ve read a number of other people’s blogs who say similar things, it is nearly impossible to predict if something (video/widget/site) will go viral.
However, I think we CAN figure out how to measure how viral something is, so we can start to compare sharable content and see which chunk is more viral. So we were talking at ReverbNation the other day and we came up with a new way to measure viral content. It is, I’m sure, not perfect nor all-encompassing, but I think it’s a good place to start.
It’s called your Viral Syndication Rate (VSR), and the math is relatively simple and looks like this:
VSR = (# of times shared / # of impressions)
So, if you have a widget that got 1,000 impressions, and has been shared 27 times, then your VSR is 2.7%. You can compare this to another widget with 10,000 impressions - shared 230 times for a VSR of 2.3% and say that the first widget is more viral.
Of course this works great for widgets/banners/badges that you can track, and is not great for YouTube videos that are harder to track (awesome post from seomoz about tracking viral video).
As a marketer this stat, just like CTR, is one that I’d want to know, it helps measure engagement. Basically it’s a crude way of putting a number on how much someone wants to pass this on. And converting it to a ratio like CTR, makes it mathematically possible to compare among content with high numbers of impressions and low numbers.
I write this from a marketer’s perspective and not a technical one, so I’m sure there are limitations to measuring viral content this way. My guess is the biggest one is tracking… but what else am I missing?
