10 ways psychology plays a big role in social media marketing

If you want to increase the odds of succeeding in your social media campaigns, you need your efforts to be paired with scientific principles and evidence to serve as your backbone. Knowledge about social psychology is a good start. It should come as no surprise that psychology plays heavily into social media marketing, which is why some posts are more likely to go viral than others. The tips below will help you utilize behavioral psychology in your next social media marketing campaign.

1. Social Proof: Utilize the follow and share method in your social media campaigns, and ensure that all pieces of content have the number of shares that each has received. By doing so, you will encourage others to get on the bandwagon and join in with the “me too” philosophy by sharing and retweeting.
2. Providing Acclamation: By providing recognition to both current and prospective customers, you express the value of their opinions. You can accomplish this by tagging their names in discussions with others and sharing their posts and tweets. This will have the effect of giving your customers and prospects the feeling that they are respected and valued.
3. Paying Attention: When your customers feel acknowledged, the next step is to ensure they know you are paying attention to them. Send your prospect a short message or comment in response to their post or comment on their tweet. This will establish the foundation for continued and open discussions while keeping your customers and prospects engaged.
4. Associational Learning: People will remember ads or contents that make them feel something significant. Therefore, associate your campaigns with Positive Stimulus – Create your ads with videos of cute babies, heartwarming stories or even run a “For a Cause” campaign! You can include humor to increase a positive word-of-mouth about your posts. Negative stimulus – This triggers fear or anxiety to reinforce call-to-action. Emphasize a prevalent problem or a negative experience and direct them to your services or express how you can help them.
5. Keep it Short and Sweet: There is a slim chance your audience is willing to exert effort in processing your content. Design your content to be clear and palatable. Offer something that they can easily chew on and digest.
6. Relate to your Audience: If your content is far-fetched, your audience will find it difficult to register the relevance of your campaigns to the templates that are registered in their brains. It is crucial to know your target audience and identify with what they already know, feel or subscribe to.
7. Be Updated: People register information better if they are constantly exposed to it or if it is recent news. Educate yourself with what’s ‘hip’ and approach your Facebook updates or Twitter posts in such a way that they rank well with the trending hashtags.
8. Prioritize Headlines: Information that we learn first is weighted more heavily than information that comes later. In Social Psychology, this is called the ‘Primacy Effect’. The first thing your audience sees will determine if your content is worth reading. That is why your headlines can easily spell the difference between your content being ignored, or it being read.
9. Keep it Simple: The human brain processes simple concepts faster. Simple patterns, simple order, simple ideas. In marketing, simple is often more effective. A good example is the Olympics logo. The human brain process that image as nothing more than a series of circles, rather than one complex image.
10. Law of Similarity: Items that are similar in colors, shapes or sizes are perceived as a group. Apply this to create relationships or groups in marketing materials. For example, when creating a pie-chart for an infographic, using colors to group similar items together within the chart itself will make it easier to understand.

Social media isn’t about technology as much as it’s about psychology and science. Understanding your audience and how their minds work is extremely important for increased social media engagement.

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