Best Sellers
Sporting Events
Express Delivery
Spring
Colour Match
Recycled Items
Small Business
New Products
Share
Tweet
Share
Share
Share
Email
Our last article discussed three of some of our favourite social media psychology studies which you can learn from to help boost your marketing tactics and skills. We are now bringing you part 2 with a few more influential studies…
Decision Making
There often comes a time when we are poor decision-makers be it for when we have to decide what to have for dinner, who to vote for or … what to put as our status? Publishing your ideas to the online world comes an uncomfortable feeling from the fear of being judged. Therefore, it is common that we will write a post and then change our minds about it. Studies tracked the activity of nearly 4 million social media users and found that 71% of users typed out at least one status or comment and then did not post it. Over the 17-day period, participants changed their mind on 4.5 statuses and 3.2 comments. It is common for people to decide to censor their posts when they feel that they do not know how their audience will react – this often comes as a result of having a diverse audience which is common to social media platforms such as Facebook. Our top tip to you would be to create personas for your audience which will allow you to understand and communicate with them better.
We Choose What We Share
Some people share content all of the time. Others do not. Research has shown that nearly 25% of people who use social media worldwide share “everything” or “most things” online. The flip side to this, the people who share nothing, comes in at 19% of people worldwide. When broken down into countries, it can be seen that Asian, African and Latin American countries tend to share more whilst countries in Europe tend to share a lot less. Therefore, if your business posts are targeted towards people in European countries, it is important to understand that they will often not share as much. Consider your region and keep your expectations realistic in terms of user engagement. For the UK, with the world average being 24% of people sharing everything, it falls at around 11-12%.
Our Emotions Affect Others
Just like seeing someone smile will often make you smile, emotions can be contagious in virtual settings, too. A huge study looked at the emotional content of over 1 billion Facebook posts over the course of two years and found that negative emotions were posted on Facebook on rainy, gloomy days, and these emotions travelled through the Facebook network to friends who lived in areas where it was not even raining. Indeed, positive emotions are also contagious such that seeing positive posts prompted more positive posts from friends. Therefore, if you want a happy, positive newsfeed it is important to share happy, positive content! This will ultimately leave your customers feeling happier subconsciously. Clever, right?
Which is your favourite study? We think it is so clever how we can tap into the psychology of what is going on behind all of the ‘likes’ and statuses and can’t wait to see how this research evolves.
