Why do Social Media Users Engage with Content and How to Hack into their Brains

Your social media efforts won’t get anywhere if no one engages with your content. Understanding why social media users engage with content, and then being able to work backwards to ensure engagement with everything you post, is the key to successfully building a brand on any platform.

Marketers will talk at length about understanding your target audience and how they think but they never delve into the psychology of the average social media user. No matter your brand, business, or audience, social media users will always engage with content for the same reasons so understanding those reasons is the secret to high levels of engagement.

Why do Social Media Users Engage with Content?

Social Media users engage with content that has an emotional effect on them. To simplify this even further, social media users engage with content that gets their brain working.

Before we continue, it’s important that we know how a little bit about how the brain works. Your brain loves making connections (such as cheeseburger = delicious) and is always on the lookout for new connections that it can make. This is an evolutionary trait and is the main reason why we’re alive today. The brain rewards itself for making connections by releasing dopamine, the chemical responsible for pleasure, and then connects that feeling with the original source of the connection (for example, cheeseburger = delicious = you’re happy).

This is the basic psychology of marketing as every piece of content is attempting to spark this reaction inside your head. For example, if you need to tend to your garden but can’t be bothered, then seeing a post about a gardener will have an effect on you. Your brain will subconsciously make the connection that you won’t have to deal with your garden if you pay the gardener to do it and will then release dopamine as a reward for making the connection. This will make you really like the idea of using the gardener and you’ll likely engage with the post because of this.

This is the reason why all social media platforms have a “like” button because you have a positive experience with the post thanks to the release of dopamine. Even if you yourself didn’t think much of the content, the brain loved the post because it ended in the release of dopamine.

How Traditional Marketing Works within your Brain

Before I go into how to apply this information to social media marketing, I want to talk about how it’s been applied for decades in traditional marketing. This is to show that not only does it work but to also give you ideas for how to use it in your own marketing.

Radio adverts are notoriously bad, not funny at all, and downright annoying, and this is actually on purpose. Your brain will hear the advert, make the connection that the business is annoying or not funny, and then reward itself for making that connection. This creates a connection between you and the business because the advert has had an emotional effect on you. However, despite having a somewhat negative experience, the business will be the first thing you think about when the need for them arises thanks to the emotional connection that you have. This will lead to you purchasing from them or, at the very least, doing research into them (which again increases the chances of you purchasing from them thanks to the rules of the customer journey).

TV adverts (UK) have similar goals but take a different approach. They aim to make the viewer laugh or to feel a strong positive experience through making them think of a goal or something that will make them feel good. The most famous example of this would be Coca Cola whose adverts feature people drinking coke whilst out with their friends. This creates the connection between drinking Coca Cola and having a great time which not only feels good because of the dopamine release but is also a great feeling in general.  

How to Create Social Media Content that Social Media Users Engage With

The trick to getting engagement with your social media content is to force the brain to make a connection and, by extension, release dopamine. This could be done through providing a reason or story for your business/product/brand, or by making a joke, or by doing something that makes the audience think.

Use your Branding to Generate Emotional Connections between you and your Audience

Branding is all about how an audience sees and thinks about you so is a good place to start when it comes to creating social media content. The majority of branding is based off innate emotional values since these are guaranteed to have an impact on almost everyone. Common examples would be feeling good, feeling successful, and feeling pleasure.

For example, GymSharks brand is all about working hard and achieving goals. These are fundamental emotional values that are innate in everyone and are therefore likely to have an emotional effect on anyone who is exposed to them. Their social media content is all about these values and it works, especially on Tik Tok where they tower over most other brands with 4.9 million followers.

You can use your brand, especially your core emotional values, as a template for your social media content. You’ve just got to approach every piece of content with the mindset of “how do I want people to feel when viewing this” and work backwards from there. This requires some understanding of what you do, who your audience is, and how to make effective content, but if you know what you’re aiming for then you’ll figure out how to make it work.

Use Comedy to Make Social Media Users LOVE you

Comedy is the best type of content on social media because it’s much more likely to have an emotional effect on users. It’s also more likely to be shared directly onto their feeds or to their friends which is the social media equivalent of word-of-mouth.

As mentioned in the article on comedy in the brain, a lot of chemical reactions happen when we find something funny which translates to a strong emotional effect on us. That article also goes into a few of the chemical processes that lead to dopamine being released, and it’s something you need to check out if you want to be the funniest person alive.

An easy way to create hilarious content is to be unexpected with your punchlines or jokes. This is because our brains are always trying to figure out what will happen next, but this process shuts down when something unexpected happens. Dopamine is quickly released to fill this gap which makes you laugh. This is also the reason why you have a nervous laugh when you don’t know what to do.  

Setting up unexpected content is quite easy, you’ve just got to be unexpected, but you can take your jokes to the next level by using logical extremes. This ties back into our brain making connections because now the set up and the punchline are connected by a connection that many people might not have seen before. The easiest way to achieve this is to shift the frame between the set up and the punchline. For example, what is the centre of gravity? The letter V! (I got this off a teachers website, I’m so sorry).

The “joke” here is that you might be expecting a science based answer but are met with an English based answer. Not only does this use logical extremes, but it’s also unexpected which is why you would laugh if you were told this in person.

Understand the Basic Rules of Social Media Content

Regardless of what your content is, if you don’t follow some of the basic rules for social media marketing then no one will engage with your content.

The most important rule for videos on social media is to understand that the average attention span is about 5 seconds. This means that you should have something new or interesting happening every 3 seconds to ensure that users stay engaged with your content. Social media don’t engage with content that they find boring or have swiped away from halfway through so do everything that you can to keep their attention.

Colouring and some elements (such as logos and styles) will mostly come down to your branding however there are two crucial questions you must ask yourself to ensure that you’re always creating high quality content. The first is “would somebody save this onto their phone/computer?” and the second is “what value does this picture/video provide?”.

These questions will help you ensure that you’re always creating high quality content for your brand which will create a stronger connection between you and your audience. Social media users follow pages that provide value to them, so being able to provide a high level of value with every post will ensure a strong connection.

Overview

• Social media users engage with content that has an emotional effect on them
• Your brain loves to make connections and rewards itself with dopamine for doing so
• Branding focuses on core emotional values because they’re emotions that everyone can connect with
• Comedic content will get the most engagement because it has a strong emotional effect on viewers
  • Use unexpectedness and logical extremes to create punchlines that social media users find hilarious
• Provide value with every post. This not one ensures you’re creating great content, but also helps with your branding