What Defines “Viral”?

Creating a post that goes viral on Facebook (or any other social channel) is always the goal of business, but why? What is so important about this and what defines viral or what Facebook calls “virality”. The answer:

The percentage of people who have created a story from your page post out of the total number of unique people who have seen it.”

The median virality rate on Facebook is 1.92%; only 15% of posts to the world’s most popular social media channel result in virality of 5% or higher.¹

But what does Facebook virality really mean anyway and how does it affect a business’ Facebook page (or does it)? Pictured is one of Geekly Group’s recent Facebook posts to our own page that evidenced a high virality percentage.

As you can see by the image, this was posted on May 6th, 2012.  Here’s how the data breaks down:

Geekly Group’s Facebook virality for this post is currently 15.54%² This means of the 341 unique people who have seen this post thus far, 15.54% “created a story” about it. But the total number of “Engaged Users” is 2,756!  So, how did this happen and how are these things connected?

1. 51 Geekly Group fans saw the original post.
2. 28 Facebook fans shared it, (so far). 
3. Those 28 shares from our fans resulted in an additional viral reach of 293 people, leading to an organic and viral reach total of 344 unique people.
4. These additional 293 Viral unique people, also shared our post.  In turn, our post was shared and shared again. 
5. As of the writing of this blog entry exactly one week later, our Facebook post has received 2,756 “Engaged Users” from its original 51 impressions.

So…do we care? And more importantly, should your business care about Facebook’s virality percentage when it comes to your Facebook analytics? Let’s talk about you first.

Facebook virality is exposure. Facebook’s virality percentage is a method of measuring branding in social media. If you’re B2C, you should care and care a lot.  If you’re B2B this type of exposure certainly can’t hurt!

B2C? Sharing is consumer power on steroids. When Facebook friends make referrals, the chances of the referred friend subsequently clicking, liking, sharing or buying increase dramatically. This is especially true if you’re targeting college-educated Facebook Users (according to Experian Simmons).

B2B? Trickier. Or not…We get a little pickier here don’t we? We start delving into WHAT was shared. Business pages on Facebook are inherently selfish. 

They tend to share items about THEM, not you. At best they’ll share something about a charitable event they’re involved in!  Try not to get too caught-up in the content they shared from your page.  Focus instead on the fact that your business posted something that another business (or one of your fans) found VALUABLE.  

Remember, Facebook analytics are rudimentary at best, and advanced analytics are really the key (shameless plug…). Since you don’t have complete visibility into WHO your post is being shared with, you’d do well to remember all it takes is one good share to get the right decision-maker or influencer to start following your business…do you really care WHAT they shared?

As for our Facebook page, we picked-up some new fans from our post. Maybe they’ll be decision-makers or influencers, maybe not. It really doesn’t matter though.  As we always say, social media is a business conference/cocktail party.  Walk around and find someone talking about something that interests you. Join the conversation and see what happens.

¹Edgerankchecker methodology: 10,000 Pages  2/3/12 – 3/3/12, 375,000+ individual posts. Page Size and Post Frequency varied from Page to Page.

²Facebook continues to track each individual post’s data for 28 days i.e. this percentage will change.