All marketers know the importance of social media in their marketing campaigns. One of the best ways to measure how well a particular item is doing is by looking at how many ‘likes’ it is getting on Facebook, or how many retweets on Twitter. A recent study was published which found that one of the key indicators on how well a particular post will is how many people ‘like’ it immediately after it is posted. When a post gets several people liking it within a short period of time after being posted, the total number of interactions it will receive over the next several days (or weeks) is significantly higher.
The report was specifically about social influence bias, and was conducted by Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral and Sean J. Taylor. In their experiment, which was published in The American Association of Advancement of Science, found that when social media posts receive initial positive votes, they will be 32% more likely to get additional positive responses from other followers.
This means that one of the most important things that marketers can do to improve their results, is to attract loyal followers who will read and like the posts quickly. Whether these are normal followers or a group of people associated with the content itself, likely doesn’t matter. Since most people don’t look closely at who it is that is liking or following a particular post, any likes which appear natural can serve to improve the overall results dramatically.
This is commonly known as the ‘herding effect,’ which inspires people to go along with what other people are doing. In this case, when several people are already liking a particular piece of content, others are likely to do the same. This is also why when someone shares a piece of content, it gets about a 25% higher positive rating than content which is not socially shared.
Of course, this can also work against marketers. When posts get negative remarks on their posts shortly after they are made, it is almost impossible to turn the tide. These negative remarks can dramatically reduce the total number of likes a post is going to get, and even attract other negative comments. Even if the marketer replies to the negative comment in order to correct the issue, it is very unlikely that the overall impact of that post will turn around to see positive results.
This should serve to remind marketers everywhere that simply being on social networks isn’t enough; you need to actively engage with your users and attract the positive interactions quickly. It also illustrates the importance of posting at the right times of the day. If you post when few of your followers are online, they won’t be able to like the post, which can discourage others from doing the same later in the day.
You can see the full report HERE.
