Psychology of Social Media

Hello, and welcome to this film on the psychology of social media.

You might wonder why it’s important to understand psychology. Well, I studied it at university and my whole career has been about behaviour and communication online, whether that was in the BBC newsroom telling stories or helping people in the last 12 years to use social media to communicate more effectively.

So what I hope to show you in this film is how an understanding of human behaviour is going to really help engage your audiences.

I’m going to talk to you about what makes people like, comment, and share. And also how you can use these things to drive behaviour, how you can get people to engage with your content.

And I think it’s important to understand, right at the start, that even though technology changes, and it changes every day, people don’t.

People are fundamentally the same the world over. And we have the same kind of needs. And by meeting your audience’s needs your social media is going to be a lot more successful.

When you’re creating content for social media, it’s very helpful to think about it in terms of what your audience needs to hear from you.

In psychology, we used to study Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So humans’ basic needs are water, shelter, the physiological needs. And then we need to feel secure.

Social media dwells in a higher realm of belonging. If we can make somebody feel as though they belong, that are heard that we listen to them and we relate to what their needs are, then that’s going to be a lot more effective.

So when you’re creating content I always say to people, put the audience. First, put their needs first, and that is the key to success.

One of the first questions to answer is, who are you aiming to have a really clear idea of your audience will also help you a lot.

So some people might start by looking at demographics, things like age, location, family relationships. What does somebody do for a job. All sorts of factors like that.

And that’s helpful, but I think even more useful is to think about psychographics.

Psychographics are psychological criteria. And these kinds of define what sort of person you are. So it encompasses your attitudes, your opinions, and your interests. So thinking about what somebody’s attitude to life is or what their opinion is on something, and also the interests – what groups do they belong to, what communities are they involved with.

These things are incredibly useful for social media and by understanding what your audience is like and what they need to hear from you, what they’re interested in – get into the mind of your audience.

And if you could create a persona – imagine it’s a real person that you’re talking to – that’s going to help you a lot as well because you can’t please, all the people all the time.

But if you can create content that’s going to resonate with just one person, it’s probably going to resonate with a lot more. So thinking about your audience’s interests and attitudes and opinions, is probably a very useful starting point.

Once you’ve worked out who you’re aiming at, and what they might need to hear from you, you’ve got to try and attract their attention, and that’s not easy these days using social media, because it’s very busy and very noisy.

So you got to think how am I going to stop somebody scrolling on their phone?

And the first thing really is to stop them and maybe having a photograph or some kind of really attractive visual or it could be the opening shot in the video, something to catch the eye and make them stop just for that millisecond before they engage with you.

So a really good visual is a good starting point, or perhaps something with colours in it. Maybe colourful text or an emoji or something like that. And the other thing is the headline, the words that you use in your post.

If you just think, how many times have I looked at an article and not bothered to read it, because the words in the headline didn’t make me think it was interesting.

So, the first few words of any of your social media posts have to really grab attention. They’ve got to be something that hooks someone in. So if you’re telling a story, a human story, for example, that kind of emotional hook to pull somebody into the story is really important.

So thinking about the words that you use, the visuals that you use, it could be an infographic or something like that because you have seconds to make a good impression. And also don’t forget to make sure that your bio and your photo, make you look like a real person that somebody wants to engage with.

You know the kind of person that you’re aiming at. You found ways that you’re going to hook their attention and draw them in it now you’ve got to think about what actually works on social media.

You’ve created the content, but how are you going to get people to engage with it, because there’s no point putting something out there if it’s not going to resonate with people and get them talking to you, or liking it, or even sharing it with their friends.

So you need to think, first of all, tailoring the content to their needs, what do they need to hear from you and how can you be of most use to them. Getting into the mind of the people, so that they feel this content is really, it speaks to me, it makes me want to engage with it.

I quite often use an acronym. So whilst we might say make your content right and that’s usually R I G H T in English an acronym like RITE – R I T E – is quite easy to remember.

So, R would stand for, relevant, is it relevant to your audience. Does it resonate with them?  Do they feel something when they look at it?

Is it readable?  Have you laid it out so that if you’ve got a large article, have you got subheadings in it or it’s got visuals to break it up? Is it something that’s easy to digest, mentally easy to comprehend?

And obviously, the other R is respectful, always be polite. Always be kind.

I stand for interesting, or informative, or insightful. If your content isn’t interesting to people, why on earth should they engage with it?  So make sure that it’s interesting and informative.

T is timely.   Timely means somebody is online at the time. If you’re posting something when they’re not there, how can they engage with it?  It’s also topical.  So if you can relate your content to something that’s going on in the news at the moment, that’s going to be much more useful to people.  Or it could be timeless, it could just be something that can go out anytime evergreen content, they call that.

E is the next one, and E stands for educational or emotionally engaging.

I think those things are really important, engaging the emotions is one of the best ways of getting social media to work for you.

So I think if you can think I want to surprise somebody, delight them. Don’t try to make them cross. But those sort of things are very very shareable – surprise delight, or and getting somebody inspired.

When you’ve created your content, you need to think about how people are going to engage with it. And sometimes it helps to think about that yourself, what is it that makes you want to like, comment, and share on a post. That’s a good starting point.

So, a ‘Like’ is quite often something you agree with, or it’s a beautiful picture, or it’s a sentiment.

A ‘Comment’, people are not going to comment if you don’t invite them to share their opinion or ask them a question. It’s really easy to get them to join in if you genuinely are interested in what they have to say.

So say how do you feel about this, what’s your experience, something like that is going to get your audience engaged with you.

And then you have to think about why they ‘share’.   People share for many reasons and I found quite a lot of people share if you can make somebody look good.

So if you put a tweet out, and you’ve quoted somebody in it and it makes them look good, I guarantee you’ll get a retweet.

The other thing people will do is they want to be useful so if you can create content that’s helpful to others. That’s very shareable.

Lots of other things also resonate on a human level so we love nostalgia – we like to look back at things and how things used to be. We like to be useful so if you have useful content that’s incredibly shareable.

You also need to think, maybe it’s something that people agree with, it defines them so, people perhaps who are passionate fans of something are more likely to share the content that you’ve created if you’ve tagged them in that. So thinking about people who’ve got interests and the groups who might be able to share your content

Perhaps then it’s also just emotionally engaging or inspiring, and if so, that’s absolutely brilliant and well done.

So to sum up, always put your audience first, put yourself in their shoes. Is this something you would find interesting? Would you care and would you share?

And think also that this is social media. We are social animals. So, make your content social, don’t just broadcast at people, actively talk to them, and engage with them.