Making Facebook invite requests emotionally appealing - a great example

I logged on to Facebook this morning, saw that I had some new requests (as well as a load of old ones up there), and decided to have a flick through to see if there was anything interesting, when I saw this:

I just couldn't resist clicking. A mix of playing to my vanity (I'm one of her coolest friends!) and that possibility that I would be letting her down if I didn't accept created a strong desire to click, mostly in order to 'reward' my friend.

This highlights the huge value of the Facebook platform for viral growth, when done properly. It allows you to utilise the emotional connections between people in order to spread applications very fast. Although this is possible outside of the Facebook platform, it's access to the social graph and ability to control and personalise messages automatically means that it (and other social network application platforms) are vastly superior compared to platforms which don't utilise the social graph in the same way.

Unfortunately, the application inside required me to send invites out to see what ranking I am, with no choice to skip (which is now forbidden by the Facebook ToS, but there we go), and because I didn't want to spam my friends I didn't go any further.

So, what drove my response? I would suggest there were three main reasons - a fixed-action response, desire to reciprocate, and liking.

Fixed-Action Response

Many studies have shown that when you give a reason with a request, compliance goes up dramatically - from 60% to 94% when asking people waiting in a queue to use a photocopier to skip ahead of them (Langer, Blank, & Chanowitz, 1978). The remarkable thing is that this is still true even when there is no real reason - when the reason was 'because I have to make some copies', compliance still went up to 93%.

Robert Cialdini calls this a 'fixed-action response' - we have an automatic tendency to comply with requests when a reason is given, regardless of the validity of that reason. This is a really simple way of increasing compliance and great for viral requests like this.

Desire to Reciprocate

It is a common compliance/persuasion technique to give a gift, free sample or favour to someone in the knowledge that this will create a feeling of obligation to reciprocate. This can be very powerful - James and Bolstein (1992) found that mailing a $5 'gift' cheque with an insurance survey was twice as effective at getting people to return surveys as offering $50 as a reward for completing it. 

In this instance, the invite request makes clear that my friend has nominated me as one of her coolest friends - quite a compliment. It then connects this compliment to a request to do her a favour in return by accepting her request. This is a clever way of linking the invite action to the request to install the application. 

Liking

It is this factor which makes the Facebook viral system so powerful. Facebook, and other social networks, facilitate the linking up of 'weak-ties' (see my longer post on why weak-ties are so useful for marketing here) - people who you have some connection to (e.g. work mate, similar interest, mutual friends) which creates a much more trusting relationship than if they were pure strangers. The viral channels on Facebook then make it very easy to spread applications and other actions/notes/UGC etc across these weak-ties.

The most powerful offline use of the liking rule are Tupperware parties (and more recently Ann Summers parties), which uses the power of liking to directly sell products.

As an advanced method, research shows that the more similar we are to another person, the more we like them (Byrne, 1971). When utilising the weak-ties in a social network, then, you are going to get the highest conversion rate when you use the social graph data to encourage invites to be sent to people similar to the inviter. An obvious way of doing this was used by the Addicted to Scrubs app, which found the friends of users who had Scrubs mentioned as a favourite show but didn't have the app, and suggested to users that they should send invites to them. However a more subtle way could be to find the friends of users with similar age/gender/location/interests and simply put these at the top of the friend invite box.