Getting in Touch with Your Users’ Emotions on Social Media

Sometimes in digital marketing, it’s easy to forget that when we talk about “users” we are actually talking about people. And those people have a range of emotions & intentions which must be properly understood and appealed to when you’re attempting to market to them throughout various inbound marketing platforms.

This raises the question: Is your social media marketing in tune with your users’ emotions? LinkedIn set out to find how social media and user emotion are connected. They identified a so-called “emotional split” that businesses need to understand in order to effectively utilize social media as a marketing tool. Here’s what the report states:

Personal social network users experience emotions around entertainment and memories. The drivers that keep them communicating on the site are their desires to socialize, stay in touch, be entertained, kill time or share their own content. Users on these sites are most often in a casual mindset; they’re often just passing the time away.

Where the split occurs is with users of professional social networks, like their own LinkedIn. Those users are on the site for an intended purpose: to find a job, make contacts, fine tune their profiles to look more professional. There’s a different kind of investment there. And that is where there is an emotional split between personal and professional social media users.

In both cases, users expect the content they read to be a good fit for their emotional state. LinkedIn users want to read industry articles, professional development blogs and the like – not touchy-feely, entertainment-oriented or nostalgic content. That kind of content is what personal users expect, as described by the LinkedIn excerpt above. So, it’s important to make the content you use for marketing to match the emotional expectations of your specific users. It’s really based on whatever site you are marketing on.

The takeaway here is that yes, you should link to different articles on Facebook than you would on LinkedIn. On Twitter, it may be okay to mix a little of both, depending on who your user base is and what you believe their emotional expectations are when using Twitter. The point is to think strategically about content and make sure the content meets the emotional expectations of your users – that is, the people who you are trying to reach with social media marketing. Give it a try, and let us know how it worked for you!