Social Media and Emotions

Social Media isn’t just a communication tool to stay in touch with your friends and family anymore. It has become a destination for many to discover and share their opinions at a deeper level, which could be called as ‘The Emotional’ Level. The social users nowadays are highly aware of the differences between an advertisement and a genuine message.

Few brands in our country are good in communicating an advertising concept as an engaging social message across its different social media platforms. Smart Social Media Marketers understand & visualize the underlying emotional characteristics of their target audience and try to align their content strategy with it. How do they do it? Let’s have a look.

Though we are bound to different life styles, cultures and languages, we are normal human beings. Every human being is tied up to an emotional aspect with or without their conscience. Every time a brand is trying to push a message, the human beings tend to relate it to an inner emotional behavior.

When they are happy with that relation, they become a fan of that brand and there are higher chances of them using the brand’s products & services. This is one of the main reasons for big brands to spend big bucks for their market research activities before they decide to launch a product/service in a particular market. The same could be applied to the social media marketing strategy of a brand.

Why do they come?

Social Media Marketers need to understand the fact that why their target audience spend time on social media. What could be the underlying factors? It entirely depends upon the social media behavior of their target group.

They might want to know what their friends are up to, they might read product/service reviews, they might connect with new friends, they might come to ease their tension after a bad day, they might want to stay in touch with their friends all the time, they might want to share their opinions or it could be anything literally.

A success of a brand’s social media strategy depends upon how well they know about the social/online behavior of their target audience. It would be much better and easier if the social media marketer becomes the very person he/she would like to target.

How to connect with their emotions?

I still wonder why big brands don’t follow their fans back on Twitter. I am sure there might be many reasons behind it. However I would suggest the smaller brands to follow their users, as the information would be highly helpful for them to frame their content strategy.

When they follow their fans, they get instant access to their social media behaviour . There must be some common characteristics of your fans because they liked and would like to know what their favourite brand is up to.

Though it is highly difficult to understand the social media behaviour of each and every fan, it is good to align your content strategy to the likes of your major target category of common interests.

The brand must spend time conversing with their fans (followers) of what they do online. It might be a time consuming process, but the brand can be assured of a safer side for the next few months.

This process has to be ongoing and should be refreshed every quarter or six months depending upon the brand’s policies and the market situation. Why do most of the marketing campaigns of big brands like KFC, McDonald, Pepsi and Wal-mart succeed?

The secret of big brands is they always connect with the emotions of their target customer. Are we ready to study the emotions of our fans now?