If you needed a reminder about the power of social distribution, look no further than the site “LoveGivesMeHope”, which has seen a paragraph of text shared on Facebook more than 565,000 times since February 1st. The company has since launched a number of sites which encourages users to share their inspirational thoughts, and in the past few days has been transformed overnight thanks to Facebook.
The story, which has attracted over 565,000 shares & likes, is as follows:
When my sister was younger she came home from school one day and demanded I take her to the library so she could get books on sign language.
I asked why? She told me there was a new kid at school who was deaf and she wanted to befriend him.
Today I stood beside her at their wedding watching her sign “I DO”. GMH
The story is inspiring, and it’s the type of growth that investors and entrepreneurs drooled over when the Facebook Platform first launched three years ago. It goes to show that content is still king. While the “article” has been on the site since February, it appears as though it didn’t go viral until some point in the past few days. While we can’t pinpoint the source of it, it’s clear that a connected user shared it on their profile, and that’s all it took.
The concept behind LoveGivesMeHope is an interesting one in that it’s ultimately a positive version or the insanely popular, FML. By enabling users to share mini-stories about their life on a specific topic, LoveGivesMeHope can roll out numerous verticals almost instantly. Such business models are extremely compelling, which is why user-generated content platforms have surged in popularity over the past few years.
However it requires an extremely active community and clearly LoveGivesMeHope has done an incredible job of fostering that community until they develop content which “goes viral”. Now if LoveGivesMeHope succeeds, they can hopefully convert this huge boost in traffic to a larger community that will develop more compelling content. It will be interesting to watch how the site performs and it will also be interesting to see if numerous other sites like this one sprout up in the near future.
Wow, it's incredible to see the number of share counts they get on facebook – very impressive. I just had a look at their site and the ratio of fb-shares to tweet-shares of their stuff is ridiculously skewed on the facebook side. In fact, it looks like they get pretty much ALL their traffic from facebook – Amazing!! I can see how facebookers would love this service, it suits fb very nicely.
Comment by Rob — May 25, 2010 @ 6:45 am
Interesting to see my site here – I've been a daily AF reader for some time now!
The story mentioned in the article was surprisingly not actually the first one we had go viral – it was a random old fact we published on our other site http://omg-facts.com back in February. The fact received 160,000 FB likes/shares in the first day, and the surge in traffic resulted in many other facts going viral – then it spread to our other sites, including LoveGivesMeHope.
Comment by Emerson Spartz — May 26, 2010 @ 6:07 am