Hunger as a Perfect Incentive for Viral Growth

It is always interesting to see how any social network or social media website reveals its nature and the interests of its users by what is generally popular among those users. For example, it is obvious that Digg users love sensational titles and lengthy lists while Reddit people seem to be more interested in lengthy in-depth conversations around politics or technology.

It is a commonplace already that LinkedIn is about business while Facebook is about friendship mostly. Just out of curiosity I wanted to see how true the friendly nature of Facebook really is and visited the list of the products that are most popular among Facebook users. And unfortunately the conclusion is pretty sad – Facebook is not exactly about friendship, it is mostly about food (and some beverages as well).

As you may know, last fall Facebook made it possible for users to create pages of some products they want to promote. This functionality is heavily used by all types of companies – both online and real-life businesses – to build presence on Facebook. The presence is ensured by inviting people to become fans of your company or your product and helping your product grow virally.

A product page, same as a profile, can feature various applications, the wall and discussion boards and also allows fans to submit their own photos or videos about the product. So basically a product page is intended to ensure deeper interaction of customers (existing or potential) with your product or service – whatever the product or service actually is.

Besides, some pages are created by Facebook users that do not represent any particular company just for fun or to demonstrate how much they actually love this or that product. Examples are pages for vodka or chocolate that are not sponsored by any particular company.

Every time a Facebook user declares himself a fan of a particular product, his friends will see this information in their mini feed – along with an invitation to become a fan of this particular product as well (which only takes one click so is not particularly difficult when you want to quickly share your support. And this is exactly how viral growth is achieved for such pages: every time a user sees something particularly compelling (like “Sarah has just become a fan of Chocolate”), this user will be sure to follow the friend’s lead if the passion is shared.

How can it help us to understand mentality of Facebook users? Quite simply actually: if we take a look at the products that enjoy devotion of the most users, we will be able to see what names or products make hearts of Facebook users beat faster (and click those become a fan links as well). So let’s take a look.

Quite logically, the most popular product on Facebook is Facebook itself – it has over 700K fans with only Apple Students approaching this result with its 640 thousand fans (and Apple users are well-known to be very determined when demonstrating their passion to the beloved manufacturer, especially when these users can benefit from some special offers when following the product life on Facebook).

The next notable group is some more or less technology-related products: Windows Live Messenger, iPhone, and YouTube. They are very popular but not actually numerous so technology products and other websites are not particularly popular among Facebook users. Besides, the three of them are mostly about communications and entertainment so they can hardly be actually characterized as notoriously geeky products anyway.

And what about the rest of the most popular Facebook products? They are all about things that are intended to please our bellies – food and drinks. And the list is quite long here – the first page contains 45 products and the vast majority of them are either about certain food and beverages brands (Nutella has almost 600K fans which is more than what YouTube has, OREO cookies with 450K fans, Ferrero Rocher, Pringles – twice in the list actually) and general food pages – chocolate as the most popular one with 475 thousand adorers, vodka with almost 400 thousand, pizza with 350 thousand admirers, and chocolate ice cream.

It is quite obvious that the page is completely filled with deliciously-looking products and they really are the vast majority of what you will find among the most popular products here. From what I know, no social media marketing and promotion specialist will ever manage to build such strong profiles for their customers with any artificial measures like begging everyone they have on their contact lists to join and invite friends and tweeting constantly about the Facebook page for the product.

What’s more, I can hardly imagine anyone could pay for a large-scale marketing campaign for chocolate or pizza – after all, even if some brands here could employ additional techniques to help their products do better with Facebook community, they would have focused on their brands only, not on making almost half a million people declare themselves fans of chocolate.

I believe the evidence is here: Facebook is only partially about friendship, what Facebook users really enjoy doing is eating and drinking – and discovering new ways to show their affection to food via their Facebook friends.

But the most important lesson for all the social media professionals (with so many people claiming to be professionals in this particular field I think such lessons should be taken into account) is that when you have something people really enjoy, you will not need to promote it as viral growth is easily achievable when you have something of value to offer to people. And if you don’t have such value to offer yet, use some ice cream or chocolate in your campaign – it may help as well.