The psychology behind the ‘like’ in Facebook
A few days ago I was reading an article concerning the psychology of the ‘liking’ in Social Media. I say ‘liking’ as well as I could say ‘pinning’, ‘tweeting’, etc., but as the king of online communities is Facebook, maybe the most common word used to refer to sharing is ‘The like’.
It was interesting because it explained how this ‘modern’ concept, born in the Social Media Age, is rooted in the deepest zones of our DNA. Why this? Because human beings base its relational behavior in two concepts: community and exchanging.
Both of them are fully applied to social sharing when we talk about becoming a brand’s follower or fan. What we find in Facebook or Twitter are conversations; social media users often reject whatever kind of sell and publicity on these fields and are more likely to ‘like’ a corporate fan page if its ‘personality’ as a company have something in common with them. Furthermore, if your brand has a strong presence and it’s well known in the offline world, there is no problem about getting followers in social media (Charlie Sheen gained more than 6 thousands followers before to post his first tweet…).
So, we have two key factors for us to customize our strategy and develop an strong community, both based on psychology matters. I would suggest to use both in order to succeed, but it’s in your own. Particularly, I would first start by creating some expectation about my fanpage by offering a gift or a promotion, furthermore to use the common ways to begin in Facebook: asking your friends to join your fan page, making an sponsor campaign. Everything is worth if your wish is to increase the number of followers and, even better, achieve a real engagement with them.
We could offer, for example, some kind of gift according to the field of your business. If you own a bar, you could display coupons in a FB tab to be printed for a couple of beers.Internet users first have to like you page to gain access to the promotion. Once they ‘give’ you their like and share your brand with their community, he will be warned with an exchangeable coupon for two bears.
But this is the first step. Once you have achieved a huge number of followers by applying various methods (Facebook adds, campaigns, inviting your friends to spread your message…) then you should apply the second step: extend the idea of community among them. Community is about exchanging relationships based on moral values, feelings, and common issues to talk about. For this reason is important to constantly check out your social media statistics and monitoring what kind of posts are the most successful in your community.Based on this data, you will improve your strategy and re-conduct your message according to your own interest and your fan’s ones, but in a way that they perceive it as a part of conversation and interaction. These factors are the root of your online communication, but there are another ones like interactivity and user’s experience that should be take in account to succeed.
