If you’ve stayed long enough in the digital world, by now you have probably heard about viral content. This refers to those crazy videos that are liked, shared, and commented on thousands of times, and probably get millions of views every single day. However, have you looked into it and dug deeper into the psychology behind it?
Facebook and Emotions: How to Trigger Emotions
Specific marketing campaigns succeed because they take time to study what makes content go viral, analyzing emotional elements and other psychological factors that act as triggers to share the material online.
You need to have a thorough understanding of your audience as well as the characteristics that may or may not influence their actions.
All Viral Images Have These Essential Things in Common
Across all ages and genders, viral content has these characteristics that are relatively common among age groups and demographics.
Positive Emotions
Researchers from Cornell University teamed up with social media experts on Facebook and altered both positive and negative content on the feeds of users. Results showed that out of the 500,000 users they tested, users saw more positive feeds than negative ones. They also published them more on their media accounts.
What does this say? Happiness is a vital factor in triggering these shares because it creates a warm, fuzzy feeling for your audience. If you want to amp up your social media marketing strategy, engage your audience with your wit and make them laugh. You’ll never know how many times a funny joke or witty dialogue can be shared over and over. Always pepper your marketing plan with a dose of humor.
Invoking Feelings of Awe and Wonder
Invoking a feeling of surprise in your audience is a powerful tool. It’s about how the human brain is wired. If you are caught in a kick of surprise, the pleasure centers of your brain are activated, giving off feel-good hormones or dopamine.
Therefore, it’s critical not just to create feel-good content, but to craft an element of surprise behind it. The question is, how do you come up with awe-inspiring content? You can try coming up with a resource that is extremely valuable to your audience, make an elegant list post that’s enough to fuel curiosity to the reader, or surprise readers with your timing by coming up with trending content.
Anger or Fear Are Emotions That Can Engage Your Audience, But Use Them with Care
You can use anger or fear to your advantage, but you have to make sure to use it sparingly, as debates can get heated and quickly escalate, and you don’t want that to happen. You can try stirring up controversy, but make sure you have the necessary facts and evidence to back up your points. Healthy debates are good because they keep people talking.
Try to Invoke Some Sadness or Nostalgia Within Your Reader
Who says sad posts can’t go viral? Sadness can be another useful tool for marketers to catch the attention of their readers. You can try provoking some thoughtful emotions that can leave a lasting impact on your reader, or even make them nostalgic about a particular event in their lives. Sadness and nostalgia are powerful raw emotions that make us human.
The Takeaway
We’re emotional human beings, and not at all times; we can also make decisions purely on logic. That’s why it’s vital to understand the psychology of human emotions and why certain posts go viral. Crafting viral posts that create powerful emotions isn’t easy. That’s why you need a St Louis social media management agency to help you flawlessly execute an influential social media marketing campaign.
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