Brain Triggers that Boost Your Social Media Marketing

#1: Inspire Curiosity
Want your readers to share your killer content? Open that email? Read your blog?

• Tell them not to
• Tempt them with a tidbit
• Ask them a topical question that leads to the only answer: your product

Inspiring curiosity lights up the pleasure centers of our brains.


#2: Good News Travels Faster
Social media has generated new rules of engagement. Neuroscientists and psychologists are finding that online readers share positive, feel-good posts over tales of destruction and woe, and that includes the sharing of customer service experiences.


The same finding applies to online video. When senior research associate Karen Nelson-Field of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing studied video sharing habits, she found that a strong positive reaction is 30 percent more likely to get a share than negative responses like anger or shock.

Of special note to marketers: posts that exhilarate also make viewers better remember your brand.


#3: Tell Tales
Stories are in a class of triggers all their own. They activate the subconscious, emotional area of the brain, which is where we decide to buy or not to buy.

Because stories stimulate areas in our brains that are connected with our senses, they have the magical quality of creating bodily responses, as if what we read is happening in real time.

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, who wrote “How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market,” says the subconscious brain is where 95 percent of cognition occurs. So by all means, move us by telling a riveting buzzworthy story that motivates the desired action.


#4: Something New
Don’t forget to brand your video well. Nelson-Field’s study also showed that when comparing the average social video to a 30-second TV ad, social videos had significantly less branding, about a third.

As long as your video makes an emotional impact, branding won’t get in the way of sharing, even if it’s overt.

by Jordan Kasteler