Viral marketing has become a very powerful tool for quickly gaining a lot of exposure and promoting products or messages.
Unfortunately, with all the glamour associated with viral marketing, many businesses have failed to establish reasonable objectives to achieve through their viral campaigns.
Many viral marketers send a message through a social network to their friends, focusing on making sure that it is presented in a way that they will all want to accept it.
They figure that as long as they send the message this way, it will become popular and be propagated throughout the network and beyond.
There are a number of reasons why this approach may not work, but message crossover is one we do not always think of.
What exactly is message crossover? If a person has a network of friends that are all friends with each other, then they are not going to have the heterogeneity for a viral campaign to work.
As an example, if someone had 50 friends on Twitter who all had the same 50 friends, a message sent from any one of them would not be worth repeating.
This is an obvious simplification because most people don't join social networks in groups like this with no intention of reaching out.
Nevertheless, many businesses execute a viral strategy without thinking about this.
They make calculations that if they have 50 friends who all share their message with their own 50 friends (which are impossible conversion rates to reach in the first place but bear with me) they will reach over 2,000 people by the time the message was exchanged the second time.
In order for viral marketing to work effectively, it is necessary to operate in a social media environment where there is heterogeneity among acquaintances and connections.
This way, you can ensure that your friends or followers will be able to pass your message along to new prospects that you would never have reached on your own.