Knowing who your audience is and what makes them tick is essential to any marketing strategy, but it’s exceptionally important for social media marketing.
Because of this, it’s important to take a psychological approach to social media marketing. This will allow you to develop content that truly resonates with your target market and helps you achieve your goals.
Below you will find some key concepts related to the psychology of social media that will help you develop more effective strategies.
Sharing is About Relating
While most of us click the “Share” button without giving it too much thought, this split-second decision serves a purpose. Mainly, people decide to share content when they think it will:
- Be useful to other people
- Help them define their identity
- Add to their relationships
- Make them feel good about themselves
- Spread the word about something they believe in
The key takeaway here: people share things because of the relationships they have with other people. So, if you want to create content that is shared all over social media, try to include a relationship component.
The Trust of Others
It doesn’t take an advanced degree to know that people prefer to buy things from companies they trust. However, what we sometimes miss is that people greatly value the opinions of their peers, and they tend to trust these opinions more than anything.
So, if your content on social media shows your target audience that other people in their group trust you, this will boost your chances of winning them over. User-generated content as well as customer reviews are great for this as they provide social proof to your business and generate trust.
Be Visual
Around two-thirds of the general population are visual learners. So, when sharing content meant to educate, make sure to include illustrations or videos. These will resonate better with people and get them to engage more with your content.
Don’t Forget Colours
In general, people make decisions about the new things they see within 90 seconds of the first sighting, and most of that decision is based purely on colour.
This is pretty astounding. It means great content can easily get lost if it’s not presented in a way that is appealing and inviting to your audience.
A lot of research has been done to figure out what associations we make with colour (red is power and aggression, yellow is happiness, green is youth, etc.), so consult this while creating branding material to ensure you are sending the right message and making the best possible first impression.
Focus on the Positive
No matter how much we grow and change, humans are still primarily emotional beings. This means you should be trying to stimulate some sort of an emotional reaction to the content you create, and if that emotional reaction is positive, then you have an even better chance of attracting a large, engaged audience.
Humour is good for this, but you need to be careful not to offend. Surprisingly, emojis are quite effective at stimulating an emotional response, so experiment with them in your content to see if they boost engagement.
Overall, if you want to have more success on social media, start taking a psychological approach. You’ll find a little bit of science can go a long way towards helping you reach your goals.