

When does a website spread itself merely by means of the Facebook Like button? - eriklinde

I recently soft launched a website by publishing a status update on my personal Facebook Wall. My goal was to get very early feedback from my friends and see to what extent the site would spread beyond my friends. I calculated that I got about 40 of my friends to Like my site (and Liking means that a link to my site automatically is posted on their wall, so that their friends can see it and Like it also). The total number of Likes at this point is 125 and has stagnated. Of the 125 Likes, 40 are my own friends, and 85 are people that are unknown to me. I have not done any marketing outside of the initial Facebook status update (there are no links to my site from blogs, Google, etc), so I am pretty sure that this can be viewed as a closed system with Facebook as the only spreading mechanism.<p>Now, to my back-of-the-envelope hypothesis: if for every Like I get, if that Like results in 0.7 more Likes every time I go one more degree outside of my own circle of friends, then the numbers would seem to add up correctly to the 125 Likes.<p>In other words:<p>40 of my friends Liked the site; 
28 of my friends' friends liked it (40 x 0.7 = 28); 
20 of my friends' friends' friends liked it (28 x 0.7 = 20); 
14...; 
10...; 
7....; 
5....; 
3....; 
2....; 
1....; 
0....; 
SUM = 130 (ie pretty much 125)<p>And yes, I can think of ways that this calculation could be flawed, but I am not looking for an exact answer; I would be willing to tolerate a fair amount of error as long as the answer is systemically correct.<p>Continuing on, and for lack of better terminology, I am going to denote 0.7 as the "magic number". In my opinion, as long as the magic number &#62; 1.0, and there are endless degrees of circles of friends out there, my site will eventually take over the universe. As we all know though, those assumptions do not hold, so I am interested in finding out what the magic number has to be for me to be able to open up a Jolt Cola and sit back and comfortably watch the number of Likes grow steadily, and at a moderately increasing pace. Would the magic number have to be 1.2? 1.5? Finally, when does it go viral? 3.0? 5.0? 10.0?<p>I would be very curious if anyone else has done any similar calculations, or if anyone can reject my initial hypothesis.
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Geee
This is called the viral coefficient, and if it's more than 1, it's 'viral
growth'. [http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-learnt-viral-
marketi...](http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-learnt-viral-marketing/)

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eriklinde
Awesome, exactly the kind of information I was hoping to find! THANKS!!

