Social media is all about connecting and sharing, but have you ever wondered what motivates you to share posts and photos? While for regular users, the answer won’t matter much, companies are finding it fascinating and key to their social media marketing strategies. It turns out ads aren’t important; funny and informative content is king.
A new survey revealed what, why and how social media users share. Key driver in why we share digital content is emotion – generally, people say that with sharing they express their personality. Surprisingly, several traditional countries such as Hong Kong, China, Poland, Turkey and Japan are leaders in this trend. This means that many people feel motivated to share a post if it somehow defines their personality. Creativity is another important piece of the puzzle – sharing creative, funny content makes people feel generally good and creative themselves. And nearly half of the people in the survey say they want to share something in order to feel and appear useful and thoughtful on social media.
The poll was conducted online among 6,500 social media users from 16 countries around the world. Researchers from Ogilvy & Mather and SurveyMonkey analyzed the results and also found that 36 percent of the people share content mainly to promote a cause. A few years back, causes, including stopping violence against animals, providing education to third world countries or environmental causes, were some of the strongest and most popular messages on Facebook, for instance. Now, promoting causes is one of the biggest things on social media as whole.
In fact, source of the content is irrelevant, at least for 40 percent of the people taking part in the poll. What really matters is the strength of the content. And no matter how many ads and promotional posts people see every day, they won’t “like” or share them. So, companies need to focus on creating relevant and interesting content rather than delivering their advertising message to everyone. In fact, people are not intimidated by ads – they are willing to see more ads on social networking websites, as long as they are interesting and of high quality. But users in the US and Japan are disappointed from the quality of content and avoid sharing it.
When it comes to producers of interesting content, people often cite companies which actually don’t create their own content. Technology companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Apple are some of the best content creators internationally. Coca-Cola is more trusted than Pepsi, Nike beats out Adidas, and Samsung is more popular than Sony.
