How to improve your social strategy using neuroscience

Social media has reached a point to affect our communication, our mood, and our behavior.

More and more people are increasing the time that they spend on social media. It has now become part of our daily routines, especially through the use of our smartphones.

There are also several studies finding a link between increased social media usage and a negative impact to our health.

However, not everything is discouraging. And neuroscience can help us understand our behavior when accessing different social networks to improve our habits.

As we get more hooked into social media, brands are looking for the best ways to connect with us.

How can you stand out when the competition is constantly increasing?

Neuromarketing, or marketing with the help of neuroscience, can be the key to an effective social media marketing strategy in 2019. HeyHuman, a behavioral communications agency shared their findings during Social Media Week London.

They’ve talked about the power of neuroscience by analyzing participants’ behavior and how it relates to social media usage to draw some interesting insights around our social media habits.

If you want to improve your brand’s social media success, here are some useful tips to keep in mind around everyone’s online habits.

How neuroscience is relevant for marketers – key points to know

Content consumption meets our brain’s need for instant gratification

The more time we’re spending on social media the more addictive it becomes to seek for increased content consumption. The idea of delivering small pieces of information makes our brains ask for more. In fact, it’s the anticipation of a reward, an instant gratification that encourages us to seek for additional activities.

Influencers can affect engagement

According to HeyHuman’s research, influencers can actually affect our reactions to a post.

They’ve looked at two big celebrities in comparison with branded content and they’ve noticed that there is an improved engagement when the content is shared by the well-known influencers. On a similar observation, they’ve compared the content shared by micro-influencers to the content shared by brands. The results were not very different, as micro-influencers stood out with the level of trust and credibility that they’ve built.

Why is this happening then? People are feeling more connected with other human beings comparing to a post shared by a brand.

Instagram is more engaging than Facebook

The research found out that users are more cognitively engaged on Instagram than Facebook. Facebook was seen more cognitively loading, leaving many of them distracted.

However, there was also an observation that Instagram is making people less positive.

On a general analysis, those who felt positive before using social media become slightly less positive after using the social networks. On the contrary, those who felt negative before using social media felt a bit less negative after using it. This is an encouraging message that reminds us that not everything is black and white when it comes to the good and bad usage of social media.

Is the echo chamber effective?

A common problem with social media is that we all end up in our own echo chamber where we only hear from our favorite people and brands.

It’s not surprising then, that the analysis of the cognitive effect of the echo chamber led with an increased engagement on people accessing their own feeds.

When they had been asked to compare the engagement between their own feeds and someone else’s, they felt more engaged with the content that was directed to them.

This is also good to consider when thinking of the power of personalization in paid social.

Bots vs engagement

Chatbots are taking over the Internet and more brands are eager to include them as part of a campaign or a customer service feature. However, the big question has to do with the levels of engagement you may face compared to the traditional human interaction.

According to HeyHuman, people are more engaged when speaking to friends but at the same time, there may be similar levels of positivity when talking to a bot. For example, men who may find it hard to open up to their friends may end up having positive interactions with a bot that might be equally helpful to a particular issue.

What can we learn?

A closer look at all these findings can help us improve our social strategy to create more engaging content.

• Brands need to consider the content overload that exists so they need to start creating content that is kinder to our brains.
• Start creating more content that is stimulating without being distracting. Focus on understanding what your audience needs from your brand
• Make it easy for your fans to engage with you. Engagement is always important so don’t make it too complicated
• Try even harder when creating Facebook posts to ensure that they are engaging
• Always create content in context. Pay attention to the context that your pieces of content are shared and start having more control of it to increase your effectiveness
• Embrace AI-driven technology to achieve newly improved human interactions