Facebook Social Contagion Study Reveals Most Effective Forms of Content Sharing

A scientific study of "social contagion through viral product design" reveals some insights regarding the varying strengths of passive and active sharing that ultimately seem rather common sense. However, given that the researchers were provided data on 9,687 users by a company launching an entertainment-oriented Facebook app, the results are strong support for both intuition and previous studies.

The short version is that "passive" broadcasting of user actions utilizing the app, such as a response to a movie that is then automatically broadcast to one's Facebook friends, drove a 246% increase in adoptions of the app being used over versions in which such broadcasting was disabled. "Active-personalized" broadcasting, in which the user adds a personalized direct message encouraging friends to check out the app, in addition to passive broadcasting resulted in only a 98% increase in adoption beyond passive broadcasting alone but resulted in greater engagement with the app.

So the conclusion is that passive broadcasting can drive more widespread adoption but if you're looking for deeper engagement, encouraging active-personalized broadcasting is the way to go.

The study in question, Creating Social Contagion Through Viral Product Design: A Randomized Trial of Peer Influence in Networks, is rather dry but represents what the researchers claim is the first scientific study of these and certain other aspects of viral uptake. Fortunately, Gregory Ferenstein at Fast Company interviewed one of the researchers, Sinan Aral of NYU and MIT, and summarized key actionable points.

Aral's study also found that such broadcast forms were up to "10 times more effective than banner ads in converting users and around twice as effective as email advertising." In addition, Facebook notifications and invites also radically outperformed advertising.

While the rules for Facebook apps have changed since the data was collected, I think this study also relates to the fact that adding Facebook Like buttons to business sites showed powerful increases in referrals on Facebook.  In addition, one might infer that offering people the opportunity to email a message is less effective than allowing them to Like a product or blog post that is then automatically broadcast to one's Facebook friends.

For web developers, the idea seems to be to make engagement as easy as possible while building in automatic broadcasting. For music marketers, that means choosing site add-ons that have such features built in will be the most productive way to build on the interest of fans.

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance: World Dance News is his primary web project.