Word-of-mouth is one of the most influential and effective tools for any brand. When you have an entire community of users who are authentically excited about your product and are willing to share their experiences with anyone and everyone, it’s powerful. These are your brand advocates - rock star personalities whose tremendous voices go above and beyond to popularize the brand and amplify the spread of your message. If you’re a content provider, understanding the emergence of a social hierarchy where brand advocates influence the masses is essential to promoting the virality of the experience.
Our Growth Story - Users Drive Virality
Virality offers something you can’t buy: passionate users who spread the word. Soon after founding ROBLOX, we recognized that giving our users the ability to build and share their virtual creations among their peers was a major element behind our explosive growth. We’ve created a platform where people come together in highly immersive social environments and co-experience a limitless variety of user-created adventures, whether it’s imagining what it’s like to fly as a bird, to manage a pizza restaurant, or to be a fashion model. Our users don’t just casually play. They buy in, their imagination is piqued, and then they tell their friends.
Over time, we saw a recurring cycle where more and more users who were also extremely active on social media would share stories and post pictures and videos about their experiences or their development progress. A social hierarchy had begun to form. Some seasoned users grew into brand advocates, while the popular, extroverted players became quasi-internet celebrities whose booming publicity encouraged even more people to power their imagination on ROBLOX. When people like TheDiamondMinecart, who has over 11 million subscribers on YouTube, upload a new video about ROBLOX, we see a palpable uptick in viral signups because of their acclaim.
The results speak for themselves. We have a community of users who are more authentically engaged and more passionate about their experiences than any other UGC (user-generated content) platform, logging over 250 million hours per month of engagement. This viral component is a huge reason for the overall growth of our company, which has gone from five million to over fifteen million monthly active users in a year. A typical gaming company wouldn’t realistically expect such consistent viral growth year after year, but a UGC platform or social network can grow virally to enormous scale.
Mastering the Pyramid of Fame
Community-driven platforms that champion creativity and support content sharing provide what amounts to a built-in social network. And similar to most conventional social networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.), the users who tend to be most engaged are the talented creators, artists, and group leaders who produce highly esteemed media for thousands and thousands of followers. Their notoriety and authentic enthusiasm for the brand trickles down the social ladder and ultimately encourages casual users to contribute or share content with their friends.
All users – no matter which tier of the social hierarchy they inhabit – have the potential to become brand advocates. From our experience, giving users the opportunity to prosper on the pyramid of fame by offering new and innovative ways to share content drives virality.
Post-Millennials Want Twitter and Twitch, Not Facebook
Facebook has long been considered to be the dominant social network. Times are changing, however. Content providers and brand advocates now have more options than ever to make an impact on their followers, and it makes more sense to diversify to other social media platforms. In our case, top UGC influencers are sharing content on more relevant platforms, such as Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube, where some are racking up millions of views every time they upload a new video. These formats are becoming more appealing than Facebook for today’s youth because they are unfiltered and present an authentic point-of-view.
Similar to today’s UGC gaming trends, we are participating in a future where the next generation of social media users will be sharing live, virtual co-experiences. Users will have more flexibility to communicate and interact with each other like never before. Embracing this future will be key to driving virality.