Social Media Psychology and Learning Your Audience’s Mind

When planning content marketing campaigns, from the beginning, digital marketers make the mistake of thinking about what to give their audience but not considering the importance of asking why they should give it. They fail to look at what motivates people’s actions, like voicing anger at brands on the social networks or posting unproven allegations.

I interviewed Dr. Wendy Wolfson, a trained psychologist, she affirmed that by understanding the motivation behind sharing and commenting on social media outlets, you uncover marketing opportunities.

Target audiences want satisfaction or answers, whether to a general knowledge search, a specific question, or just entertainment. When customer focused content meets and satisfies customer demand, they achieved engagement from successful content marketing.

Image Credit: Bruno Cordioli

Provoking an Emotional Response

People have a love affair with numbers making social sharing numbers critical to the popularity of your site and whether your site goes “viral”. Social proofing is a powerful force which tells first time visitors that many people read and share the post and they should share the post as well.

People have less interest in brand messaging than many marketers believe. Quality, unique and engaging content is what customers seek. Not stepping away from the brand and taking an objective look through the eyes of your customer, can cause failure.

Waiting, Watching, and Listening

Listening to your audience is necessary when starting any marketing campaign. To create relevant content, you must know what customers are talking about and in what context. Knowing why they enjoy and share content, and respond to calls of action, is also a necessary part of the planning stages.

Failing to remove yourself from the brand and look at it objectively through the eyes of the audience you are trying to reach, is a common mistake made by many organisations. Regular, everyday people are not interested in brand messaging like most marketers believe. Uniquely engaging, quality content that is neutral, bridges the gap between the audience and the marketing campaign.

While social proofing is a good practice to follow, if context and relevance is missing from your content for the target audience, the campaign is doomed from lack of education, entertainment, and answers.

The Long-Term Relationship Building

When building a community for the long-term, a big role is held by psychology when you are nurturing the community. For a community to grow, it needs knowledge, entertainment, and engagement. Relationships between brands and communities have to be nurtured and like any relationship, the community relationship needs value.  When creating engagement in social media, understanding psychology helps. An understanding of what drives, motivates, and entertains while getting an emotional response from people makes content marketing flourish. You must give your community value to make it grow and gain your ultimate goal of a viral content page.