Warning: Facebook Has You by the Balls with Friends Day
Originally published at www.stateofdigital.com on February 4, 2016.
They say you can’t create a viral. Well, Facebook proved that wrong, again. With their ‘Friends Day’ videos. People can’t stop sharing. And it’s not the first time either. Let’s look at why this is a success and what we can learn from it. And how we are subliminally persuaded.
Today is ‘Friends Day’ on Facebook. If you are on Facebook, you will have spotted it. If not, something is wrong, or you might not be on Facebook. Facebook is making us share a video about our friends. They say because they want to celebrate their 12th birthday.
It’s much like they do with the overview of the year. It’s being widespread and people are complimenting Facebook on it. What is happening though is that Facebook has us by our balls. Our psychological balls. They are playing with us and we like it. And I must admit, it’s pretty clever.
Why can’t we stop ourselves from sharing this?
One of Facebook’s biggest secrets to success is that it understands its users. It understands what triggers them not just to share and like, but to come back.
As said, the stories are already widespread and will spread much further during the day. Especially considering the fact that the US hasn’t even woken up for the most part when writing this. It will be one of the most successful viral campaigns this year. That has a lot to do with the psychology of sharing.
The Facebook Friends stories are shared because of psychological reasons. We (almost) can’t stop ourselves from sharing. Here’s why. It’s in our brains. It’s subliminal persuasion. Here are the subliminal tricks Facebook plays with us.
Facebook strikes an emotional chord
The biggest reason why we share this video might just be emotion. People love sharing emotions, more than anything in the world actually. If we talk to each other we rave, we complain, we cry and we laugh. Face it, that’s what we do. If we don’t do any of these things we will soon find it boring.
It’s a lesson every marketer should know. If you evoke emotion, people will react. This is why clickbait works. This is why articles that go against the establishment are usually popular. Those articles are often evoking the ‘angry’ emotion.
The Facebook Friends videos are all emotion. In this case, it’s a different emotion that is triggered: the happy one, where we like our friends. Emotions drive people to action. This definitely will drive people to action because we see something we like.
The more emotional the content, the more likely the message will be spread.
Facebook plays on our ego
The second big reason why we can’t stop sharing these videos is simple: it’s our ego. What people care about is themselves. That is the most important for everyone.
We actually saw an article not too long ago that our friends on Facebook actually don’t care about us. At first it might seem that ‘Friends Day’ contradicts that. We share about our friends after all, right? Wrong. We share about ourselves. This actually proves the article right.
Think about these three things:
1. People love to get noticed
2. People love to talk about themselves
3. People want to look good in the eyes of others
Research shows that about 50 percent of what people talk about on Social Media is “me” focused. (source: Content Code). People most of the time talk about is their personal experiences or personal relationships. What we do when we share these updates is not talking about our friends but talking about ourselves. We act on all three human behaviors mentioned above. We live on social status. Hell, social media exists because of social status. And these videos provide just that: social status.
There is an interesting thing about these videos that prove this.
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Originally published at www.stateofdigital.com on February 4, 2016.
