Mediaboss Marketing

One of my favorite things aboutsocial media is that its still such a young and new form of communication. It feels too early to take anything as a given, so were all experimenting, testing and learning together.

Every day seems to bring exciting new studies as research shows us more about how social media is changing the way we relate to one another, share information and even form our identities.

Ive been collecting a few of these studies and thinking over how they might relate to making us all better marketers (and hopefully better people, too). I thought I would share them with you today. Here are the major findings of7 social media psychology studies that will make your marketing smarter.

Most of us are familiar with that slightly uncomfortable feeling you get before you publish something new to the worldweve even written about it here.

Sometimes the feeling leads to a creative breakthrough. Other times, it causes us to change our minds altogether. To find out more about how this feeling affects the way we publishupdates to social media, two researchers at Facebook conducted a study on self-censorship (that is, the posts you write and never actually publish).

Over 17 days, theytracked the activity of 3.9million users (studying the actionsbut not the keystrokes or content).During the course of the study, 71 percent of users typed out at least one statusorcomment and then decided not to submit it. On average, they changed their mindon 4.52 statuses and 3.2 comments.

Researchers theorizethat people are more likely to self-censor when they feel their audience is hard to define. Facebookaudiences tend to be quite diverse which makes it hard to appeal to everyone. Users were less likely to censor their comments on someone elses post because the audience was more concrete.

Marketing takeaway: We all want to know our audience more deeply so we can communicate with them better. To understand your own audience better, try developing personas. And remember:Just because you dont always hear from your audience doesnt mean theyre not listening.

We know that emotions can be contagious in person-to-person settings, but not much was known about whether emotions can spread in the same way online until one of the largest-ever studies on the subject.

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7 Social Media Psychology Studies That Will Make Your Marketing Smarter by @courtneyseiter