Abstract
From January to October 2015, U.S. brands published 35 million posts across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, sparking 65 billion actions with social audiences (i.e., comments, shares, re-Tweets, etc.). Yet just 7 percent of these actions involved sharing of a brand's content.1 Despite what is increasingly recognized as the value of shared content for building brand equity, to the author's knowledge there has been scant study on what actually makes content shareable and the psychological drivers that prompt sharing. Replicating an earlier framework that outlined ways to increase virality of content, the author tracked the 2,000 most-shared social posts over a 12-month period on Facebook and then surveyed more than 10,000 social-media users about what might drive them to share that content online.
MANAGEMENT SLANT
There are clear psychological drivers that affect sharing of brand content on Facebook: social currency, emotion, usefulness, and content that tells a story.
These drivers vary by users' age and gender as well as by brand category.
These differences should inform the ways in which marketers craft their social content to inspire their audiences to share their content and, thereby, generate word-of-mouth and earned-media recognition.
INTRODUCTION
Even before social media, people shared information for a variety of reasons (Berger, 2013). Some sought to increase their social recognition; others wanted to gain status or learn useful tips. On occasion, an emotionally moving story would call for such notice. And sometimes the motive was as the desire to pass on a great tale.
The rise of social-media platforms—including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Pinterest—has created a digitally enabled way for people to share what matters to them (Fulgoni, 2014). And they often can do so in one easy “click” that reaches their entire social network of friends, colleagues, and family.
Interacting with brand social content already is mainstream: From January to October 2015, brands and publishers in the United States posted 35 million pieces of content across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, prompting 65 billion engaged actions (i.e., “Likes,” shares, comments, re-Tweets, etc.) with social audiences. The volume includes a 47-percent growth in social engagement over 2014 for the average brand across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Year-over-year growth in certain key categories—specifically television programming, media publishing, and sports—was even stronger, at 80 percent, 140 percent, and 126 percent, respectively. Social impressions (e.g., the number of times a Facebook post is displayed to an active user within a newsfeed) also increased—43 percent year over year from 2014 to 2015.
But social media does have its own tiers of engagement. And, sharing a response to brand content—a step up from a simple postlevel “Likes”—is much harder to elicit from consumers. Though the volume may seem impressive (3.2 billion shares of brand content on Facebook and 1 billion re-Tweets), such activity represented just 7 percent of all social-engagement activity by brands from January to October 2015.
Taking the step up to sharing is highly valued by marketers. It demonstrates additional earned (“free”) impressions on consumers' own social-network newsfeed. Moreover, it extends the reach of social posts beyond people who already have indicated an interest in the brand. Additionally, many brand stewards place a premium placed on sharing, as it involves a personal “endorsement” or recommendation (Bampo, Ewing, Mather, Stewart, and Wallace, 2008) that can carry far more peer influence than a simply postlevel “Like.”
The goal of the current study was to identify which psychological drivers might increase the likelihood of social sharing of brand content on Facebook.
The author had a particular advantage: access to a total census of social-media activity data from the Shareablee dataset, which measured the content posted by (and the social interactions made in reaction to) brand- and publisher-created content for more than 100,000 products and services on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Google+, and YouTube.
There were two parts to the current study:
rank the 2,000 most-shared U.S. Facebook posts created by brands and publishers over a 12-month period across several brand categories (while also controlling against the 2,000 least-shared posts);
survey U.S. Facebook users, testing drivers identified in a previous study (Berger, 2013) and building on that earlier framework.
During the survey, the researchers further distinguished between gender and age of survey respondents as well as between product-category drivers. Product categories included
Automotive
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG): Beauty
CPG: Food and Beverage
Entertainment
Financial Services
Games
Publishing (online and print)
Quick-Service Restaurants (QSR)
Retail
Sports
Telecom
Television.
By identifying the most significant drivers of shareable content, the author believes that the current study will provide brand marketers with a deeper understanding of the reasons that people share. The author further believes these insights can inform marketers' creation of social content on social-media channels.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The content-sharing ecosystem on social networking sites such as Facebook has created new opportunities for brands to benefit from consumer-driven viral marketing or word of mouth (WOM).
Customers and prospects “share” brand content to their personal networks and thereby become impromptu viral marketers and mobilize messages through social networks on behalf of a brand. Studies have shown that consumers seem to be highly aware of the public nature of their actions when sharing content and as such should be viewed not only as target audiences but also as “gatekeepers” of personal networks, making them cautious of associating themselves with brand messages overall (Araujo, Neijens, Vliegenthart, 2015).
The author believes that companies have bought in to the value of this kind of sharing as a means to assimilate the additional trust and attention that messages from friends and other trusted sources receive (Bampo et al., 2008) while still largely driving—and therefore controlling—the content of the message (Van der Lans, van Bruggen, Eliashberg, and Wierenga, 2010).
The very nature of social media—and its relatively recent impact on marketing—means that the category literature is not as rich as other instruments of brand persuasion. In this study, the author has built on existing research about online and offline WOM marketing (sometimes also referred to as “viral marketing”) and considered the existing scholarly work about what drives sharing and viral messaging in other mediums, in the context of Facebook sharing.
Viral Marketing and ROI
Research on viral marketing often has focused on its return on investment (ROI; i.e., on diffusion and sales (Godes and Mayzlin, 2004, 2009; Goldenberg, Lehmann, Shidlovski, and Barak, 2006).
Some research has been centered around
how to forecast “virality” (Van der Lans et al., 2010),
how to “seed” viral marketing and consumer sharing (Hinz, Skiera, Barrot, and Becker, 2011), and
how to measure the advertising effectiveness of “Likes” and other social-network stimuli (Brettel, Reich, Gavilanes, and Flatten, 2015).
Understanding how effectiveness measurement helps unlock advertising dollars for social networking sites also has been examined, particularly within the context of multi-platform campaign effectiveness (Fulgoni, 2014).
Scholars additionally have analyzed the impact of brand differentiation in WOM (social, emotional, and functional drivers; Lovett, Peres, and Shachar, 2013). Certainly, studies of WOM within digital media (Levy and Gvili, 2015; Lovett et al., 2013) have given shape to the new dimension of marketing research. And insights derived from brand-focused sharing (Fulgoni, 2015)—in addition to research into cross-platform effectiveness driven by social media (Nagy and Midha, 2015)—have given further focus to the current literature.
Focusing on one slice (sharing) in one segment (Facebook) of the social-media universe somewhat restricted the amount of research available as context for the current article. Nevertheless, examinations of the influence and power of WOM brand enhancement (Goldenberg et al., 2006; Katona, Zubcsek, and Sarvary, 2011) and such classic WOM studies provide evidence of the long-term influence that one consumer can have on literally hundreds of others.
What Drives WOM and Viral Marketing?
The key question becomes: What motivations drive consumer sharing of brand content, and how do these drivers work on social-networking sites such as Facebook?
Studies have shown that content that triggers emotion tends to be shared most by consumers (Dobele, Lindgreen, Beverland, Vanhamme, and van Wijk, 2007; Ecker and Bolls, 2011), and the informational value or “usefulness” of a message also has been found to stimulate pass-along behavior on the social networking site Twitter, particularly when combined with informational content (Araujo et al., 2015).
Scholars also have found that a compelling social motive to engage in WOM is self-enhancement to signal or enhance one's perceived expertise or social status (Lovett et al., 2013). This also has been characterized as “social currency” among peers to drive online virality of content, making messages more “spreadable” to consumers (Berger and Milkman, 2012).
In the context of social sharing—particularly as advertisers increasingly are committing time and resources to social media to target customers (Deal, 2014)—more research is needed to specifically understand the effectiveness of drivers and motivations of traditional WOM and viral marketing, particularly given the impact of increased time spent on mobile devices (Fulgoni, 2015).
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Despite the rich tradition of scholarly work on social media and WOM, research is limited with regard to testing potential drivers of social-media sharing against the most-shared content.
The author of the current paper sought to fill that gap by creating a framework based on an earlier “STEPPS” model (Berger, 2013) that outlined six drivers of viral content:
Social currency: what you talk about makes you look to others.
Triggers: stimuli that reminds people to think/talk about certain things.
Emotion: content that makes people feel something.
Public: showing that other people are using a product.
Practical Information: crafting content that is useful to the viewer.
Stories: integrating your message into a narrative.
From those six drivers, the author of the current article developed seven research questions to inform the study's assessment of
the rate at which a Facebook post is shared;
how that rate may help drive the decisions on content creation for social marketing by brand managers.
The research questions began with desired perception of the sharer…
RQ1a The Value of “Social Currency”: Will the most-shared posts likely be content that makes the sharer “look good”?
RQ1b The Value of “Social Currency”: Will the most-shared posts likely be content that makes the sharer appear “intelligent”?
RQ1c The Value of “Social Currency”: Will the most-shared posts likely be content that makes the sharer seem “funny”?
RQ1d The Value of “Social Currency”: Will the most-shared posts likely be content that makes the sharer appear to be “in the know” or “trendsetting”?’
… and move onto more general considerations:
RQ2 The Impact of Posts that Create Emotion: Are emotional drivers significant when it comes to driving sharing (excitement, happiness, anger, sadness)?
RQ3 The Impact of Practical Value/Usefulness: Could the most shared Facebook posts be viewed as having “practical value” or “usefulness” by the average person, and is this significant when it comes to sharing?
RQ4 The Importance of the Story: Will content that has a storytelling element more likely be shared? How significant is “storytelling” when it comes to the content we share with others?
METHODOLOGY
The Data
This study examined Facebook posts only: The topic of the research was social sharing, and social sharing on Facebook accounts for 96.4 percent of the combined sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. From January to October 2015, company posts on Facebook garnered 3.2 billion shares, compared with 1 billion re-Tweets on Twitter; at the time of this study, Instagram did not allow for direct sharing of brand content.
The research team at Shareablee ranked the 2,000 most-shared U.S. Facebook posts from the 11 million posts created by brands and publishers during the 15-month period of April 1, 2013, to June 2014. The group studied the data from the perspectives of total shares, as well as on a normalized basis.
Specifically, all brand posts from company pages with at least 250,000 fans (approximately 10 million posts) were ranked, first, by total shares, and then again by total shares expressed as a percentage of fan size for a normalized ranking. Brand categories considered were Automotive; CPG – Beauty; CPG – Food and Beverage; Entertainment; Financial Services; Games; Publishing (online and print); Quick-Service Restaurants (QSR); Retail; Sports; Telecom; Television.
The researchers also ranked the 2,000 “least-shared” brand-focused Facebook posts during the same period, as a control for factors present in both the most-shared, as well as the least-shared sets of content. Variables considered were age, gender, and brand-category differences in the same set of categories.
Survey Design
Survey-respondent recruitment was conducted using Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online web-based platform for recruiting and paying subjects to perform tasks, including but not limited to survey completion. MTurk was chosen specifically for this study because it has the potential to facilitate fast, low-cost experiments in the United States with a diverse subject pool.
To begin a survey using MTurk, a researcher (or, to use Amazon's terminology, a “Requester”) establishes an account (www.mturk.com), places funds into an account, and then uses the MTurk web interface to post a “job listing” that describes the Human Interaction Task (HIT) to be completed and the amount to be paid for satisfactory completion.
At this stage, the researcher can set requirements for subjects, including country of residence and “approval rate” (the percentage of prior HITs submitted by the respondent that subsequently were accepted by Requesters).
The MTurk interface gives the researcher flexibility with which to conduct a study. In addition to using MTurk's embedded workspace to set up simple tasks, the researcher also can refer subjects to an external website to perform. If subjects are referred to an external website, the site can be programmed to provide the subject with a unique code to enter in the MTurk website to demonstrate that they have completed the task.
In the case of the current study, respondents were directed to Survey Monkey's interface to view the individual creative of each Facebook post and to complete the survey questions.
The survey began on August 30, 2014, and ended on September 20, 2014, and it was limited to U.S.-only respondents for a total of 10,083. Using U.S. Census data, the respondents were weighted to match the total U.S. online population on age, income, and gender.
A minimum of five respondents were asked to view each piece of content. Each respondent rated each post across all four survey dimensions. Each dimension was informed by the corresponding research-question theme (RQ): “Social Currency,” “Emotion,” “Usefulness,” and “Story.”
Study Format
The research team recruited survey respondents from Mechanical Turk and invited respondents to click through to a survey, which they completed on Survey Monkey. Survey respondents filled in a unique MTurk ID into the Survey Monkey survey, in order for the researchers to correctly attribute and vet responses. Once these surveys were completed, the researchers tabulated and checked the responses and approved the survey completion.
Each survey respondent was asked to view a single Facebook post before answering 10 questions in the study about that post. The image of the Facebook post did not reveal how many social actions that post had already garnered, but it did reveal the brand that posted the content.
Ten questions were asked of each respondent, for each post, to be answered on a 5-point scale. They were introduced as follows:
“Please read and look carefully at the following Facebook post, before answering the 10 questions below. If at any point you need to refresh yourself of this post, please remember to scroll back up to the top of the page, and take another good look at this Facebook post.
“Sharing this post on Facebook would make the sharer ‘look good’.”
“Sharing this post on Facebook would make the sharer ‘look intelligent’.”
“Sharing this post on Facebook would make the sharer ‘look funny’.”
“Sharing this post on Facebook would make the sharer ‘look like a trendsetter’.”
“How Angry would this post make the average Facebook reader feel?”
“How Excited would this post make the average Facebook reader feel?”
“How Happy would this post make the average Facebook reader feel?”
“How Sad would this post make the average Facebook reader feel?”
“How Useful would the average Facebook reader find this post?”
“To what degree does this post ‘tell a story’?”
Statistical Analysis
The one-sample two-tailed test was used to measure a significant (95 percent level of confidence) difference in the percentage of respondents who selected the top two boxes in the survey versus the bottom two boxes in the survey. This test was used for each question, category, age, and gender grouping.
RESULTS
The current study's objective was, in part, to identify and validate (or invalidate) the drivers that make content shareable. A survey of more than 10,000 respondents was conducted, asking questions informed by the original research questions (RQs). Demographics and brand categories also were evaluated in the answers provided by the respondents. The author believes the findings offered key insights for brand managers.
The research sought to test potential drivers of social-media sharing against the most-shared content. In particular, the author examined the efficacy of sharing as demonstrated by four drivers of viral content:
Social Currency
Emotions
Usefulness
Story Telling.
“Social Currency”
“Social currency” reflects the private motivations that might encourage a social media engager to do more than “Like” a brand and, in fact, to share an endorsement of a product or service.
Overall, respondents rated the most shared Facebook posts as posts that would make the sharer “look good” for 52 percent of all posts, making this the most significant overall variable for content sharing. Posts that would make the sharer “look intelligent” comprised 36 percent of the posts analyzed for this study, which made this dimension the second most important overall variable. Posts that would make the sharer “look funny” or appear to be “in the know” or a trendsetter” were not a significant driver of sharing overall (See Table 1 and Figure 1).
RQ1a The Value of “Social Currency”: “Will the most shared posts likely be content that makes the sharer ‘look good’?”
52 percent of respondents overwhelmingly agreed that sharing to “look good” was a driving factor for the top-shared posts.
14 percent of respondents believed that social currency was neither “not really” nor “not at all” a factor.
RQ1b The Value of “Social Currency”: “Will the most shared posts likely be content that makes the sharer appear ‘intelligent’?”
Sharing to “look intelligent” was important across 36 percent of respondents.
RQ1c The Value of “Social Currency”: “Will the most shared posts likely be content that makes the sharer look ‘funny’?”
Although seeking to be “funny” did not appear as a driver either overall or in any one industry category, it was the leading driver of sharing among 18- to 24-year-olds (See “The Impact of Age on Social-Sharing Drivers,” p. 467.)
RQ1d The Value of “Social Currency”: “Will the most shared posts likely be content that makes the sharer appear to be ‘in the know’ or ‘trendsetting’”?
Sharing in order to be viewed as a trend-setter, or being viewed as funny, were not significant across all categories of content for the average person.
Sharing content to appear “in the know” was an important factor of social currency when the content was relevant to the Automotive, Games and CPG: Food and Beverage categories, driving 62, 50, and 41 percent of agreement, respectively.
“Social Currency” Drivers that Respondents Say Make Content Shareable
Brands Drive Social Sharing by Invoking a “Social Currency” Context
Examples of content that rated highly in these categories included (See Figure 1):
new-product releases (Automotive and Games), particularly when timed to popular conferences and the holiday season:
for CPG: Food and Beverage, when the content informed consumers of nutritional information and wellness tips.
Emotions
RQ2 The Impact of Posts That Create Emotion: Are emotional drivers significant when it comes to driving sharing (excitement, happiness, anger, sadness)?
Does content that evokes an emotional response drive sharing? The researchers examined the most-shared posts in the context of whether they would make the average person feel…
Anger
Sadness
Excitement
Happiness
… and found that only Happiness and Excitement were significant, driving 47 percent and 27 percent of agreement across all categories, respectively.
Happiness trumped Excitement in almost every category:
Sports (68 percent versus 37 percent)
Retail (67 percent versus 27 percent)
Beauty (66 percent versus 28 percent)
Publishing (61 percent versus 17 percent).
Excitement was the leading driver in
Games (51 percent versus 48 percent)
Automotive (47 percent versus 44 percent),
also primarily male skewing, for whom Excitement trumped Happiness in terms of inspiring sharing.
Except in the context of breaking news at both the national and the local level, Anger was not considered a driver of the most shared content. Sadness only factored around news pertaining to the passing of celebrity/public figures, such as actors Robin Williams and Paul Walker during this time period.
Usefulness
RQ3 The Impact of Practical Value/Usefulness: Could the most shared Facebook posts be viewed as having “practical value” or “usefulness” by the average person, and is this significant when it comes to sharing?
Across the entire study, 42 percent of respondents agreed that “usefulness” was a significant factor among the most shared content. There was strong variability in the significance of Usefulness as a driver of the most-shared content, as can be evidenced in the following category breakdown (See Figure 3). CPG: Beauty, Publishing (magazines, newspapers, and online publications), and Games all overindexed in terms of its most shared content being “useful.” Usefulness did not factor significantly in Sports, Automotive, and Television content sharing.
The impact on shareability for content deemed to be Useful was
CPG: Beauty: 75 percent
Publishing: 51 percent
Games: 47 percent
CPG: Food and Beverage: 37 percent
Retail: 35 percent.
The research further demonstrated that the brand Facebook content that respondents found most useful can be classified into two types: Incentive-driven and Informational.
Incentive-driven content included coupons, contests, offers for advance access to something new, and special savings. Respondents were asked whether they would share content about brands such as the beauty-products retailer Bath & Body Works, donuts-vendor Krispy Kreme, and Starbucks. In all three instances, the posts were widely shared, especially when they were offered as community-activated incentives. Case in point: Krispy Kreme offered a “sweet surprise” to everyone who engaged with a post when the posts' total number of engagements surpassed 12,000.2 The final shared tally was nearly 143,000 shares—almost 12 times the campaign objective (See Figure 2).
Figure 2Incentive Posts Drive Sharing: Krispy Kreme's Sweet Surprise
Informational content included do-it-yourself tips, recipes, lists, and even infographics. Informational content was very successfully activated among news outlets, which use social media to get the word out about breaking news and community happenings at the local market level.
In terms of differences among age demographics, “Useful” content was not a sharing driver among the 18- to 34-year-old demographic overall but became more significant for 35- to 44-year-olds, 45- to 54-year-olds, and 55+ posters (See “The Impact of Age on Social-Sharing Drivers,” p. 467).
Storytelling
RQ4 The Importance of the Story: Will content that has a storytelling element more likely be shared? How significant is “storytelling” when it comes to the content we share with others?
Storytelling was the most significant driver of sharing among the four core dimensions analyzed for this article.
Specifically, 52 percent of respondents found that the most-shared content contained a story in itself. To be deemed as “story,” content didn't need to be long or complex, but it did need to have enough substance on the social platform post itself (the average number of words in “storytelling” posts on Facebook analyzed for the current study was 27 words, with 235 at the longest).
Information Impact by Product Category
Some of the most-shared examples included human interest stories, like Covergirl's story about a young woman's fight against cancer (See Figure 4).3 In terms of the type of content on a post, all “story” posts in this study were either photoillustrated, or videos, and contained no text-only “status” type posts.
The graphic nature of engagement makes sense within not just the Facebook ecosystem but within the broader context of what tends to drive social engagement and sharing overall, considering that photo-illustrated posts and video posts
comprised only 52 percent of all posted content in 2014;
drove more than 80 percent of brand engagement in the United States on Facebook.
In the first three months of 2015, social-video content was four times more likely
Brands Drive Social-Media Sharing by Telling Stories
It's a story-telling presentation lesson that a number of brands have embraced, such as (See Figure 4):
UPS, in content that had the shipping-service provider's highest sharing mark, told community-focused stories, emphasizing events in which a local UPS driver had become a community hero.4 The driver, Maurice Lynch, helped to save the life of a man who had fallen off a lawn mower, by administering CPR. The post generated nearly 810,000 “Likes” and 41,000 shares.
Figure 5Storytelling Engagement Impact
The Walt Disney Co. effectively made use of uplifting, shareable quotes embedded in a graphic image.5
National Geographic magazine summarized article highlights amid vibrant, striking nature images for optimal share-ability.6
Among brand categories assessed in the current study, CPG: Beauty brands enjoyed the most engaging incidents of storytelling, followed by (See Figure 5):
Publishing (69 percent) and
Telecom providers (60 percent)
Entertainment (57 percent)
Financial Services (55 percent)
Sports (49 percent).
Storytelling was not a significant factor for CPG: Food/Beverage, Games, Retail or Automotive content.
DISCUSSION
Within certain categories—Social Currency, Emotions, and Storytelling—the data from the current study revealed other factors driving social sharing, specifically gender and age.
The Impact of Gender On Social-Sharing Drivers
Do women share more—or differently—than men? Why (or why not)?
The research team found that both men and women held in common a desire to “look good” to others. For women, however, the need to “look intelligent” topped all other social-currency drivers; for men the biggest motivator was to “look funny” (See Figure 6).
Emotions—both positive and negative—were not a huge determinant of sharing for either gender (24 percent for women, 20 percent for men), but “Happiness” was most important for women, whereas “Excitement” led for men.
Perhaps the most marked difference lay in the view of Usefulness or Practical Value. Some 48 percent of women agreed that the most shared content was “Useful,” whereas usefulness was not a driver for men.
Content that made the sharer “look intelligent” to others was the strongest driver of social currency for women and content that made the sharer “seem funny” was the strongest driver for men.
The Impact of Age On Social-Sharing Drivers
On the basis of the findings of the current study, there are several strong differences in drivers for social sharing based on age.
Gender Influences on Drivers of Social Sharing
18- to 34-year-olds: Looking Intelligent, Looking Funny. Although it was not a significant driver held across the entire sample, sharing to look “funny” was most important among this age group, driving 33 percent of the “strongly agree” response. Sharing to “look intelligent” was also a strong motivator, with sharing to “be useful” and to “tell a story” showing up as the least significant drivers, with only 9 percent and 10 percent agreement.
Digging deeper into the data, however, “Storytelling” was not entirely absent from the 18- to 34-year-old age group; it had merely taken a different form. Rather than being driven to share content that tells a story in itself, the cohort shared content that enabled them to tell their own story, placing their own experiences at the center of the content.
As a case in point, witness a post by National Football League sponsor Visa,7 encouraging audiences to tell their own story of becoming an NFL fan during the draft. With the cover line, “It's never too early to start,” it featured a photograph of newborn infants wrapped in bright-yellow branded Pittsburgh Steelers football team towels as they lay in maternity-ward bassinets that displayed the babies' name tags in the shape of footballs. That single post, heavy on “cuteness factor” and apparently irresistible, drove more than 100,000 shares (See Figure 7)—more than 66 times more shares than the average of 1,495 shares per post between July 1, 2013, and June 30, 2014.
35+ Storytelling Drives Sharing. Among Facebook posters between the ages of 35 and 44 years and 45 and 54 years, and more senior consumers ages 55+, the strongest sharing driver (35, 34, and 29 percent, respectively) across all categories was content that tells a story. For the age 55+ crowd, however, “Looking Good” was every bit as important as “Telling a Story.” The researchers additionally found that this senior segment also valued “Usefulness” more highly than any other age segment.
The narrative appeal was particularly powerful in categories such as CPG: Beauty, Financial Services, Entertainment and News—a finding that crossed both “utilitarian” products such as insurance and soap, as well as “fun” products such as entertainment content.
Driving Social Sharing through Audience Engagement: “Tell Your Own Story”
CONCLUSIONS
The author believes that few brand marketers have yet to fully realize the value of sharing—an indication of genuine consumer interest and advocacy demonstrated, notably, on Facebook and a number of other social-media sites.
A comprehensive and recent study of the 2,000 most-shared U.S. Facebook posts created by brands and publishers over a 12-month period across several brand categories revealed a number of emerging trends that, the author believes, may work to the advantage of marketing practitioners. Among the trends are the following:
The Value of Social Currency: Sharing to “Look Good”
Of the four drivers of social currency, content that makes the sharer “look good” was the strongest driver (52 percent) across all respondents.
By contrast, although 36 percent of people agreed that the most shared posts made the Sharer “look intelligent,” this desire was adversely significant for Television, Sports, CPG: Food/Beverage, Games, and Retail content.
The Impact of Posts that Create Emotion: Happiness Is Key
Findings from the current study revealed that “happiness” is the most significant emotion to evoke when crafting content made for sharing.
Across all segments, content that made people feel Happy most likely was shared (47 percent), even more so than Excitement (24 percent). This was particularly significant in the most shared content of Sports (68 percent versus 37 percent) and Retail (67 percent versus 27 percent) of people, respectively.
By contrast, the most shared content did not evoke either Anger or Sadness.
The Impact of Usefulness
Women most likely identified “Usefulness” as a driver in the most-shared content. Among all the examined drivers, content that contained something “useful” or of “practical value—i.e., tips, recipes, discounts, etc.—was identified as being most significant across all posts, with 48 percent of women finding this to be a significant driver of social sharing.
“Usefulness” as a whole became more important to online consumers over the age of 55.
The Mixed Power of Storytelling
Among 18- to 35-year-old online consumers, Storytelling was not a significant driver, although this attribute did appear for highly shared posts that encouraged audience members to tell their own story rather than pass along a brand story. Storytelling overall became significant among people over the age of 35.
IMPLICATIONS
Consumers are taking more actions than ever with brands and publishers across social channels, but, the author believes, more conscious design of posting strategy is needed if brands are to reap the full benefits of social media and its viral potential.
Much of the utility of social content hinges on people transmitting content that helps the brand. This transmission occurs in many cases for consistent, measurable reasons: because the content contains valuable social currency, it evokes emotion, is useful, or contains a story.
Brands can see higher percentages of sharing if they ask the following four questions of their content:
Will sharing this content make my consumer look good?
Will this content evoke a positive emotion, such as happiness or excitement?
Is this content useful, or does it otherwise contain information that has strong practical value?
Does this content tell a story in itself (or, when addressing millennials, does this content encourage the audience to tell their own story)?
Differences based on age and gender of brands' social-media audiences as well as the brands' own product categories may influence results. But, the author of the current study believes, if at least one of these questions can be answered positively, brand content will be more shareable.
FUTURE RESEARCH AND LIMITATIONS
Further research could examine the impact of these drivers on content depending on how the consumer feels about the brand itself. The social posts analyzed by survey takers for this study included the names of the companies that posted the content. Showing brand names in posts could carry positive or negative responses, depending on the survey takers' impressions or feelings about the company. Further research could examine the impact of removing any branding or marks from the content to see if the company itself has an impact.
For this study, the researchers examined Facebook posts only. They did so because sharing on Facebook accounts for 96.4 percent of sharing on Facebook and Twitter (2.4 billion shares on Facebook compared with 880 million re-Tweets on Twitter). As brands increasingly architect cross-platform social campaigns, however, it would be useful to examine the same dimensions for other social networks, such as Twitter.
Future research also could measure the relative return (the return that an asset achieves over a period of time compared with a set benchmark) on these attributes, depending on the category, type, and timing of content.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tania Yuki is the founder/ceo of Shareablee, a New York City provider of social-content analytics for business. Before launching Shareablee, Yuki led product management for comScore's online-video ratings service, Video Metrix, and also led the TV Advertiser Solutions group for Visible World. She has received a “Top Women in Digital” award from Cynopsis, a “Women in Digital Next Generation” honor from L'Oréal, and a Great Mind Award from the Advertising Research Foundation.
Footnotes
↵1 Shareablee data (January 2015). See also, “Top 25 Social U.S. Brands State of 2014.” (2015, February 3). Retrieved September 18, 2015, at http://blog.shareablee.com/post/109977591274/shareablee-reveals-top-25-social-u-s-brands-of
↵2 “If we get 12,000 Facebook shares on this 12-12 Facebook post by 12-12, everyone gets a sweet surprise!” Retrieved on September 16, 2015, at the Krispy Kreme Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/130424181000/posts/10152030427396001
↵3 Covergirl Facebook page post eulogizing a late Covergirl. Retrieved September 18, 2015, at https://www.facebook.com/74506070864/posts/10151717308240865
↵4 UPS Facebook page post about driver Maurice Lynch. Retrieved September 17, 2015, at https://www.facebook.com/154423787905266/posts/661265873887719
↵5 Disney Facebook page graphic image, “The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.” Retrieved September 17, 2015, at https://www.facebook.com/11784025953/posts/10151316374135954
↵6 National Geographic Facebook page post about a young olinguito, a new mammal species discovered in Colombia. Retrieved on September 17, 2015, at https://www.facebook.com/23497828950/posts/10151729059178951
↵7 Visa, sponsor of the NFL, Facebook post, “It's never to early to start.” Accessed September 17, 2015, at https://www.facebook.com/211718455520845/posts/643119859047367
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REFERENCES
Vol 55 Issue 4
