How virality works : A look inside recent triumph of Sarahah

If you are not sleeping under a rock your virtual social world is supposed to be surrounded by ‘Sarahah’ at this very moment. Sarah went viral. Even if you are not using it, your friends in social media are posting some interesting messages and flooding your Facebook or Twitter feed. Before digging into the details let’s have a look at some basic information about Sarahah.

What is Sarahah?

Sarahah is an anonymous messaging app built with the intention to get constructive feedback from people you know.

According to the app maker Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq — With your friends Sarahah helps you, by discovering your strengths and areas for improvement; Let your friends be honest with you.

USP: Now to help to be honest, Sarahah gives the person who message, a musk i.e. anonymity. So that without the fear to lost friendship, someone can speak their mind and can help the other person rectify something or just can reveal their feelings or can just share some good thoughts.

How Sarahah works?

The idea is that you sign up, send the link to your profile to whomever you want for feedback, even if that means posting it publicly online, and then anyone with that link can anonymously provide feedback to you.

Usage statistics of Sarahah

App statistics

Since the launch in early February 2017 to August 2017, the App has been downloaded in only Google Play more than 5 million times. Then there is iOS (Apple doesn’t provide download statistics) for which we can expect also some million users. It means more than 5–7 million people asked for feedback about themselves already from the apps.

Google play has 5 million downloads for Sarahah

Similarweb shows that in the previous month of July it received almost 35 million visit.

As while we give feedback it goes to the website and if we remove the total visit of the parent domain i.e. 23.5%, we get around 26 million visits in subdomains, resulting in an enormous count of 26 million feedback provided.

Why are people using Sarahah?

The craving to know about ourselves

We want to know what people think about us. It is the same reason we give slam books to our friends at the end of schools and college days. Some of us really don’t give a fuck to what other people have to say about us. But that number is really really low. Even we may not care about the large mass out there but a considerable large number really do want to hear from our near and dear friends.

FOMO factor

Apart from we like the idea the fear of missing out is a good contributing factor in Sarahah’s growth. When we see a huge number of people opting in for something and also sharing some results which are in term, either funny, nostalgic, good or inspiring. We want to try it. Some of us want to try it badly.

We want to go with the flow, we want to get the taste of the trend.

At the end, we can’t resist the allure of learning how people really feel about us.

Auto elimination of negativity

When sharing the received messages in social media, no one shares the tough ones, the bad ones, the hurting ones, the secret ones. None of us getting any notion that those can be the case. Even if we become ready to receive the negative constructive criticism always things are not constructive enough resulting to cyber bullying like Yak Yak, which was shut down for good.

Good, interesting, humorous messages shared by others in social platforms auto eliminated the cons of the app and increased the opt in.

High viral quotient

As a result of the above-mentioned factors, the viral coefficient of Sarahah is very high.

A viral coefficient is a number which tells you how many users each is your present users bringing to you on an average.

For Sarahah, we can assume from what we see that number of persons who are providing feedback to a person is also opting in and sharing the link among their circle to get feedback on the very next.

Exposure to people

Sarahah is incomplete without our friends. Especially the persons who crossed our path in this life. When ever we are asking for the feedback we are bringing in other people to the platform who while giving feedback interacts with the platform for the first time. Then they understand how this thing can be interesting and in turn opts for it and the cycle goes on.

If you see the image below you will see how much people went to Sarahah website from social and most of them to provide feedback following the links shared by our friends. As we all know our friends are mostly into Facebook, it contributed almost 82% of traffic from social media segment.

The effort to create the viral loop

As an app developer, if you see Sarahah, you don’t have to give any perks to your user to share among friends. You don’t even have to tell them how good it is if their friends are here with them. Not even you have to ask them to share in social media, rather it is the part of the flow. If you want to have feedback, you have to share.

It is about creating something that everybody wants to put their hands on. It is about creating something that evokes emotion. Sarahah nailed it brilliantly.

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About the author

Ranit Sanyal is the co-founder of RedElegant, a design driven development studio.

The post first appeared in RE Blog

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