Book Review: The Hidden Psychology of Social Networks by Joe Federer
Read the book in 10 minutes
If you thought video was the most effective post type on Facebook… you’re wrong! This book looks at the most effective ways to use content on social media to target the psychology of users based on the social platform they use.
Our online and offline selves are intimately tangled and it’s not always clear how. For our brains, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit are real places. We don’t just log on to social media. We navigate through it. People are ‘in’ social media spaces, not ‘on’ them.
What is a meme?
They are not just the little pictures with funny captions you share on Facebook. They are any idea with a chance of propagating. As ideas occur to us, we share them and as these ideas are shared, they evolve. These could be tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots, or of building arches. When we’re talking about Facebook memes, we’re really talking about the format used to communicate ideas. We need to spend as much time thinking about the ‘meme machine’ (the type of content we’re creating) as we spend thinking about what we want to say. We currently force our memes into the norms of our industry - eg. 60, 30, 15 and 6 second cuts to fit into videos. Video can be the right meme machine to deliver the meme but it’s not always. Most of us know that algorithms operate behind social networks to share the stuff with which you’re most likely to interact. The content type we use shoul be low friction and the most efficient at delivering their ideas.
Meme machines
According to Facebook, people on mobile devices spend an average of 1.7 seconds per piece of content. So the efficiency of communication is pivotal to successful meme sharing in social feeds.
Video - Videos must grab you in the first few seconds of viewing. By adding captions, you’re removing the requirement for viewers to engage without sound. Video shouldn’t be the only type of content we create, and it shouldn’t always be our default format. They work well on TV and Youtube because they fit naturally in those environments. However, in most social feeds, video is a cumbersome format when the goal is to efficiently communicate an idea.
EXAMPLE: Life hacks and recipes - show people how best to use your product. Tested two videos of concept, a minute long and 15 seconds long, plus one image with message overlayed in text. The static image drove 4x the likes, 3 x the comments, and 2 x the shares. BUT according to Facebook the short-form video was more engaging. How? For most post types, Facebook counts engagements as all clicks that happen on a post. When a video auto-plays for 2 seconds, Facebook counts it as an engagement. Therefore they claim it as the most engaging, even though no one technically engaged with it.
Text, images, gifs and gif-like videos are much more active meme machines that move at the speed of Facebook audiences.
Image with text on it - You can read through the text, process it quickly, and there is no sound and therefore no headphones required or need to click to full-screen. We just read and move on.
GIFs and Gif-like videos - AKA silent videos have made a huge comeback. Popular Gifs tend to cut immediately to the relevant action. These are very efficient at delivering memes that static images can’t.
By optimising your content to be as light and self-contained as possible, you ensure that the memes will spread and stay intact as they go.
Principles to social strategies
1. Add value:
Bookmarkable content - Give users a reason to interact or pass along. Give people a useful tool, an infographic with real, applicable information or ideas for new ways of using a product. Something badgeworthy that people can define themselves with in front of their friends. Lighthearted, uplifting or just plain funny content that makes our audience laugh enough or emotionally connect and want to share with their friends. Many people share a post to bookmark it in their feeds.
Badgeworthy content - Allows users to communicate about themselves to their friend groups. We need to understand what the brand symbolises for the people who want to share it. How we dress, the alcohol we drink, the brand of water bottle we buy tells the world something about us.
Commiserative Content - So relatable or true that we use that content to connect with our friends. Tongue-in-cheek and lightly self-deprecating humour is extremely effective. It requires the brand to take risks.
Aspirational content - helps us represent our ideals, goals and aspirations. Idyllic scenery, lofty ideas, heartfelt values and inspirational stories are examples of aspirational content.
2. Design meme machines to reinforce the value of the meme
One of the most common mistakes is using the content’s text field to hold the headline. From the perspective of a user, content that fully contains valuable information and prioritises the most compelling memes is much easier to pass along. Using the share button and adding your own text will override the text on any post your user shares.
Any information should be present within the content itself.
EXAMPLE: While text polluted beautiful imagery, all information included within campaign content led to 11 x more engagement, 35 x more earned reach and 46 x more content sharing.
3. Create space for personal connection through narrative elements
When information is presented in the form of a story, we remember it better. Despite researchers explicitly encouraging participants to think rationally about the decisions, people consistently donated more to charities that told stores about individual people. Personal stories tend to generate more empathy. We should strive for our content to be episodic, accessible and valuable in whatever order our audience encounters it. Short windows of attention can make storytelling difficult.
Behind the scenes content makes our polished content feel more authentic and human. This includes bloopers, mistakes, conversations. Narrative humanises our content in powerful ways. Personalisation can include “Blogger’s” secret family chilli recipe - makes it more memorable than “Chilli recipe”.
4. Develop content for a specific objective or action
One way we can appeal to the reptile brain and avoid getting filtered out is to make things simple for our audience. Keeping particular actions in mind - eg. likes, shares, views, during the development process simplifies the consumption process. We can then measure just how well that content is accomplishing the goal. Key performance indicators corresponding to different types of content should be built directly into a brand’s social strategy. Is the post meant to drive engagement, sharing, clicks to a website, conversations, downloads, views?
5. Maintain brand consistency and ownability
We should always ensure that the content is fully encapsulated, and that includes attribution to our brand. Our branding should always be embedded in the meme machine itself.
The ideal self, managed self and true self
The memes we wear in social networks are the things we say, the content we post, the videos we share. They are akin to digital clothing and define us to our social groups. We curate positive moments, meaningful memories, and other pieces of content and culture that we want to define us. Consciously or not, when we’re evaluating ourselves in social media, we’re comparing our complex lives full of ups and downs to other’s highlight reel. Ironically this can have a devastating effect on our mental health. While a post on Reddit can spark drastic positive improvements to a community of depressed people, social media filled with beauty such as Instagram can make users feel depressed. This brings about two critical indicators of a user’s mindset are how users are identified in a social network, and how they’re connected to other people.
1. Our online identity
Either we identify as our offline selves (eg. Facebook and Snapchat) or we participate anonymously (Eg. Reddit and 4chan).
2. How people are connected to each other
On Facebook and Snapchat we’re generally only connected to the people we know. On Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter we may have both friend connections and a plethora of people we don’t know.
On Reddit and games forums, we’re not organised by our connections at all, but by shared interests, ideas or passions.
The way we look at these can determine the types of memes that will resonate with us.
Freudian Model
I won’t go too in-depth with this (although the book does) but basically there are 3 different egos that manifest themselves in different kinds of social networks.
Social media is driven by our deeply rooted nature as social creatures. Different social media structures satisfy different social and psychological needs for us. The problem with adding value depends on the social networks they are in.
Superego - where learned rules create an image of ‘ideal self’ - seen through Instagram and Twitter, TikTok and LinkedIn.
Through these platforms, we participate as our offline selves, but there is a significant mindset change that comes from being exposed to millions of people we don’t know. This is the superego (ideal space) and where we curate particularly bright highlights. In most of these networks, we don’t have friends, we have followers. These allow us to express the selves we one day hope to be, and the selves we most want to represent to the world.
Instagram elevates us to the level of influencer even if our audience is low. We curate our feeds a little bit more, we’re more selective of the photos we post, we filter the photos a little bit more. Using hashtags, we also have the chance to be discovered by an entire world of people we don’t know. We’re usually identifiable as our offline selves and have a connection with people we know. The value of our experience is defined by the amount of social media engagement our post about that experience generates. Engaging with audiences in this space means helping them manifest aspects of their ideal selves. Some around looks, travel, food, occupations, political ideologies, and other ideals.
Badgeworthy content outweighs bookmarkable content because self-representation is our primary aim. Elevating a brand to the level of superego is not easy, but for some categories, it’s a reasonably natural fit. Fashion, food, fitness, music, and any category that represents an aspirational hobby or interest. Our social standing means everything, high follower counts, strong engagement with our photos, tags and retweets from influential accounts are all ways we build credibility in superego space.
Ego - This is where we engage as our offline selves and are connected exclusively to the people we know offline, eg. Facebook and Snapchat.
These are managed versions of ourselves, where anything we say or do has a one-on-one impact on how people will think about us offline. These allow us to solidify our connections to our tribes. When people engage in branded content here, they are saying “Something about this brand and its content represents a part of myself and I’m using it to express myself to my friends.” By creating an emotional video, it can find a true sweet spot of share-driving creative.
68% of what people share are to give them a better sense of who they are and what they care about. It’s all about self-representation. Video is often too heavy and slow to grab attention consistently in social media, and Ego networks are no exception. In ego space, trends can form when a particular idea or piece of content harnesses a preexisting, widespread belief, eg. Dove adverts. The content just needs to be valuable enough for people to engage. The branded content that succeeds at driving sharing is the content that helps people connect with each other. Content that speaks to us personally, eg emotional, applicable to our real lives, or a joke among our friends, will drive engagement because our connections in Ego networks are the ones in which we have the most personal and emotional investment. This is where word-of-mouth is driven by content-level-conversations.
Brands are built one post at a time. Don’t get bogged down in each individual post, look at social media in a more holistic way. Brands that are synonymous with things people don’t want to be associated, eg. weight-loss products, will find it hard to gain traction on these platforms.
Ids - While anonymity has borne the brunt of issues regarding online safety, it has also fuelled a constructive and healthy place where people are free to be expressive and candid. These tend to be organised around their interest and passions rather than by their offline connections. Reddit, Tumbler, Imgur, Twitch and 4chan are examples of these.
Anonymous users on Reddit feel deeply connected to each other and the platform, which encourages them to share in ways that others in identity-based networks don’t. These give us a license to explore new territory, try on new ideas and interests, and form bonds with those who share our passions. The combination of people’s shared experiences in networks organised around common ideas generates a sense of community that’s distinctly different from how people relate to one another in identity-based networks.
Engaging with people in anonymous space requires adding value to the conversation at the level of community. This is content that goes behind the scenes, makes people feel involved in something larger, and that sparks genuine discussion. People are more authentic when they’re anonymous and they expect brands to be as well. We also need to understand that we can’t command every conversation surrounding our brand. The community will talk about your brand regardless of whether you’re there.
Four lessons for building and honing a social strategy
1. Social listening is critical to building a social media savvy brand
Listening to the ecosystems, meme pools and cultures is how we get feedback from our customers and non-customers. Listening helps us figure out which channel will give the most value and how we ought to interact within those channels. While reports and stats can give us good information, listening tools are powerful ways to process this information. 20% of our content will drive 80% of our results. Who is your community manager? Some learnings:
Copy superimposed on a post can generate 46 times more clicks of the share button
Recipes and crafts that include ‘process shots’ drive significantly more engagement than static images of the final outcome
Nature photography tends to generate more engagement when accompanied by a quote or personal story
Complementary colour schemes tend to grab more attention and generate more social actions
Static images and gifs tend to drive more earned reach than videos
Cute animals outperform everything else
2. Choose as many channels as you can do well, and designate channel roles
Before tackling too many platforms there are some questions to ask: What will this new channel allow us to do that our current channels don’t? How will we evaluate the success or failure of our participation in the new channel? How much resource and media budget can we reasonably allocate to it? Don’t spread yourself too thin as it will exhaust resources and guarantee low impact. The right channels and strategy mix is different for every brand.
3. Start your creative process with the most competitive content environments in mind
Take the most successful memes from your most competitive meme pools and use them on less competitive meme pools. Those are the most competitive meme pools in which our brand messaging competes. Social networks allow us to be less precious about publishing our assets, which gives us the opportunity to try different angles.
4. Timing can be an effective tactic but it’s not a strategy
Timeliness is only one factor in the broader category of relevance. It will eventually lose its relevance. However, a relevant post will never lose its timeliness. Creating real-time content can help you stand out from the crowd, but most brands should create high-quality evergreen content that doesn’t matter when it was created. A great brand strategy is one that allows our brand to bring a unique and interesting perspective to a conversation. More often than not, great content today is still great content tomorrow.
