Head of Content Marketing at Buffer, Courtney Seiter’s favorite things about social media is that it’s still such a young and new form of communication.
Every day seems to bring exciting new studies as research shows us more about how social media is changing the way we relate to one another, share information and even form our identities.
I’ve been collecting a few of these studies and thinking over how they might relate to making us all better marketers (and hopefully better people, too). I thought I would share them with you today. Here are the major findings of 7 social media psychology studies that will make your marketing smarter.
#1. WE’VE ALL WRITTEN A POST AND THEN CHANGED OUR MINDS
Most of us are familiar with that slightly uncomfortable feeling you get before you publish something new to the world. Sometimes the feeling leads to a creative breakthrough. Other times, it causes us to change our minds altogether. To find out more about how this feeling affects the way we publish updates to social media, two researchers at Facebook conducted a study on self-censorship (that is, the posts you write and never actually publish).
#2. Emotions shared online are contagious (especially happiness!)
We know that emotions can be contagious in person-to-person settings, but not much was known about whether emotions can spread in the same way online until one of the largest-ever studies on the subject.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, used software to examine the emotional content of one billion Facebook posts over two years—particularly on rainy days, when the chance of negative posts was generally higher.
For the other five studies, click here.
