Psychology of The Social Media Marketing

One of the most dazzling facts about the social media is just how deeply its success is rooted in basic human behavioral psychology. Sure, from a rational standpoint, vanity metrics such as shares, likes and, comments don’t directly generate any value, however, they do go above and beyond to boost one’s self-esteem and influence the way in which a massive body of demographics thinks and behaves.

For instance, imagine a scenario where two products were displayed on the same Facebook page and one has ten times the likes of its counterparts. Any visitor to the page would automatically assume that this is the product that boasts more sales, when, in reality, it doesn’t have to be so. Still, this example alone more than proves that these ‘vanity metrics’ maybe do have some power over the mindsets of your customers. In other words, despite what their name might be suggesting, they seem to affect more than just vanity of the parties involved.

That being said, it is more than clear that every single social media marketing tactic heavily relies on psychology. Therefore, discovering and exploring these bonds may do wonders for your understanding of how these strategies work, as well as enable you to utilize them more efficiently. All in all, here are some basics.

Why do people share

By making your content more shareable, you can effortlessly expand your reach and get a combination of free-social media promotion and a word of mouth (WOM) recommendation. However, in order to learn how to make your content share-friendly, you must first know why people share, in the first place.

While there are a lot of reasons, there are several major ones that definitely stand out. First of all, people share content they identify with in order to define who they are in the online environment. Next, people tend to share informational videos, especially if they believe it could be of value to someone they are close with or if someone they know might recognize a few of their own beliefs or core values in them. Therefore, making your content relatable might help boost your outreach.

Another benefit of making relatable content lies in the fact that some people share in order to connect with people who feel the same. In other words, they are using your content as the beacon to rally all those like-minded currently in hiding. For this reason, it might be a good idea to be a bit more general, rather than specific, while making your content (in order to cover more ground).

Finally, some people share in order to support a cause. This happens for one of two reasons:

• to support a cause they find worthy
• to use this as a way of increasing their own engagement and in this way boost their own feeling of self-worth.

For this reason, following latest trends and happenings around the globe might be worth your while. Keep in mind, though, that no matter how counterintuitive this may sound, disasters and controversial topics usually see higher engagement rates than their moderate counterparts.

The sense of belonging

Even though they are supposed to bring people together by default, it is quite easy to feel like you are missing out on something on social networks. By creating a compelling online brand, you can easily drive more and more audience your way and even present your community of clients as a group that your target demographic will want to be associated with.

“Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.” Oscar Wilde

According to experts dealing with custom web design, this starts with an increased online exposure but needs to be followed up with a unique way of standing out. This entails numerous advertising and digital marketing techniques all working together in order to create a homogenous entity of brand and consumers.

A picture is worth 60,000 words

The next thing you should know of is the fact that a human mind has the ability to process an image about 60,000 times faster than a textual content. This is why about 90 percent of all information we receive is visual. Moreover, it is a well-known fact that 8 out of 10 people don’t bother to read past the headlines, which creates a kind of an awkward situation when it comes to content marketing. While some authors suggest that making text skim-friendly may boost these numbers, it is far more efficient to enhance the immersion of the reader with a nice picture.

On the other hand, in the age of mobile devices, you need to make sure that the image you use is properly optimized across various devices. Luckily, this doesn’t take much time and can even be completely automated, provided you find the right digital tools for the job.

Try capturing an emotion

Another thing you should definitely try out is capturing an emotion. You see, one of the reasons why testimonials are so efficient is the fact that it is much easier to put together a face of a smiling, satisfied customer with a great service, than any kind of textual recommendation. This is one of the things you might want to aim for in your content.

Image source whatsyourgrief.com

While it is obvious that this mostly refers to a visual content such as video and image, capturing an emotion in a text is far from impossible. Still, it requires a lot of skill and talent.

One step at a time

Keep in mind that not everyone is ready to become a paying customer right away. You see, the buying cycle has several different stages but it always starts at the same place. The first impression that your brand makes on them needs to be as positive as possible. Furthermore, in order to get one foot in the door, without startling them off with a hard-sell approach, you might want to present your audience with an opportunity to make a small commitment before they are ready to make a major one. Luckily for you, social media is filled with such opportunities, seeing as how liking, commenting and following takes no effort whatsoever.

At the end of the day, there are many other secrets you could exploit. Some honorable mentions are using influencers to emulate gratification from your client’s superiors or using storytelling techniques to win your clients over. Regardless of what approach you decide to take; you need to keep in mind that the key to a successful social media marketing campaign lies in appealing to the emotional (rather than rational) side of your audience’s mind. As Maya Angelou once said: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. Needless to say, this inspirational quote needs to be a core principle of any successful social media marketing campaign.

Icon assets credit goes to Freepik