5 Ways To Make Your Software Viral

Remember that social media helps software developers and vice versa? As I mentioned in that post, a growing number of software today has a social option, which helps its users spread the word, effectively creating a viral product. But how do you do that? How do you help your users spread the word about your software? What would interest them, and why would they want to Tweet or share their activities with their friends?

Well, people always like…

1. Showing off success
You can set a daily goal for any software you use – and I mean ANY software. Image processing like PhotoShop? People want to show off how many images they’ve re-touched that day, or how many paintbrushes they’ve used, or how many actions they’ve run. Facebook game like IncrediLand? Give people a daily goal of number of animals to grow, or a weekly goal of how many breeding attempts they’ve done. Visual Studio plugin checks code for errors as they are typed? Have a daily goal of less than 5 mistakes found in tests, or 3 tests written consecutively error-free.
People like to show off their successes. Whether it’s how many things they’ve accomplished that day, or the amount of work they’ve avoided, people like to talk about it, establishing their place in their social network. Which leads us to people…

2. Showing off their taste
You can customise a lot of software products today. It could be a complete colour overhaul and UI design a la Gmail, or it could be a more basic font change and how notifications will appear, like Skype. So why not share that information, and how to do it? People want to see how you got that specific mauve colour in your TweetDeck columns, or see if it’s easier to work with Visual Studio when your have light grey text on a light green background.
Help them share it – one simple ‘Tweet’ or ‘Share this’ button, and your users have another option with which to show their friends how their personal Skype looks. And you know what that means – more people downloading Skype, to see what all the fuss is about.And more people downloading, means more people will need…

3. Help forums
It seems obvious, but lots of people forget that help forums were once THE social networks – by default. And, for your software, they are still an excellent place to interact, and be talked about. Make it easy for your users to tweet about your incredible customer service, share good reviews on Yelp! or even add a recommendation to your business on Google Maps, it all adds up to showing their friends what amazing software they are using.

People like helping others with their favourite topics, they enjoy being an integral part of the community, and they feel like they are making a difference – which they should be, if you’ve been following my posts, and know a bit more about social marketing. And when your users have begun to understand how to use your software, and start working with it, they usually want to…

4. Share their finished product
People use your software to create content. From code, to images, to 3 dimensional representations of crime in San Fransisco. Guess what? They want to make that public to their friends, they want everyone to see what they’ve managed to do (see no. 1). Give them them option to do so. Make it simple to post the image to Flickr, PhotoBucket, or whatever you want. Give them the option to tweet about their completed C# project, and upload it to SourceForge.

Even if it’s proprietary content, people can tweet about the fact that they’ve completed their bit in the latest CGI film using your Blender plug in, sharing this with the rest of the CG community, who can then wait expectantly to see the new release. Because if there’s something we’ve learned about people from social media and social gaming, people like…

5. Achievements
Give your users a medal, badge or level for each achievement they get using you software, and see how your users will talk about it. Make them a mayor of location just for being there like FourSquare, give them the level of Master when they get through 5 tutorials, or even have a ‘Left the software running for 2 days’ achievement. Have a page on your site where you list the accomplishments, how to get them, and who has already managed to achieve what. Go one step further, and leave a few achievements hidden, so only really dedicated users can find them, tweet about them, and get other users to hunt for them too.

If you leave this post with just one thing, it’s this:

Make it easy for your users to share.

Add a ‘Like’, ‘Tweet’ or ‘Share’ button to your software in strategic places, and you will be surprised at how many people do it. They will share their new found discovery in their social networks, which will give you a place to talk to tons of potential new customers.