Did You Get Wordle Today?

If you're not already playing Wordle yourself, then you're exhausted by seeing it everywhere on your social media feeds.

It's hard to scroll through any sort of timeline today without seeing someone sharing a pictogram of their little green and yellow boxes, triumphantly bragging that they got the word of the day in anywhere from 1 to 6 tries.

There is an expression that says that "everything old is new again," and that could not be more true in the case of Wordle.

Like its cousins Hangman, or television's Wheel of Fortune, a word guessing game is nothing new. Each one might have a slightly different variation - in Wordle's case it's a restriction of 5 letters per word, but the idea is as old as time.

Nor is there anything inherently novel about Wordle. Only a few months after its development, the game already has countless knock-offs online, from Lewdle (which makes players guess only lewd words) to Absurdle, which is built not to let players win and can change the rules on the fly.

So what on Earth has made Wordle, a rudimentary web-based computer game, so popular?

Simple. It's easy to share!

Wordle was actually developed last Fall, but did not become popular until the designers added the share feature, allowing players to easily share their score with friends and build up some healthy competition.

From there the game exploded, even making its way onto Saturday Night Live's cold open sketch earlier this month. If it seems like everyone is playing Wordle, it's because almost everyone is.

The marketing lessons here should be echoing loud and clear: keep it simple, and keep it duplicable.

The same applies to how you speak about your business. Potential clients may be interested in your business, but if you're automatically making things too complicated then they tend to lose interest quickly, and will certainly have a hard time sharing that information.

Even if your work is complicated, finding a way to describe it that's easy and accessible makes it possible for your clients to promote you without thinking twice about it. We promote things that we like without even thinking about it, like a great movie or our favourite restaurant, because we want to share something amazing and it takes no effort to do so.

Take a lesson from Wordle, and make your business easy to share. You'll be amazed at how quickly people start talking about it.