Social media has had a pro­found impact on con­sumers and mar­ket­ing alike. In fact, stud­ies have shown tweet­ing is hard­er to resist than cig­a­rettes and alco­hol. So why is social media so addic­tive?

Our col­lec­tive social media depen­dence can be, in part, attrib­uted to two chem­i­cals: dopamine, which is about desire and caus­es us to seek out infor­ma­tion; and oxy­tocin, which gives rise to warm, fuzzy feel­ings, such as when we demon­strate affec­tion.

In fact, tweet­ing with friends has been shown to spike oxy­tocin to the same lev­els as a groom on his wed­ding day. That’s pow­er­ful stuff, accord­ing to Court­ney Seit­er, head of con­tent mar­ket­ing at social media man­age­ment plat­form Buffer, who spoke recent­ly at Moz­con.

It also impacts how con­sumers see the world. Case in point: Seit­er said Face­book users are 43 per­cent more like­ly to feel oth­er peo­ple can be trust­ed.

Addi­tion­al­ly, Seit­er said con­sumers post online because they like to talk about them­selves. In fact, she said we talk about our­selves 40 per­cent of the time in face-to-face inter­ac­tions, but a whop­ping 80 per­cent of the time online. In part, that’s because there’s gen­er­al eti­quette about talk­ing in per­son, but the rules are still unclear online.

In addi­tion, Seit­er said going to our Face­book pages has been shown to raise self-esteem.

So what does this mean for mar­keters?

Shareable Content

These are cer­tain­ly rev­e­la­tions mar­keters can use to their advan­tage when craft­ing con­tent.

Anoth­er ele­ment for mar­keters to con­sid­er is that con­sumers have a ten­den­cy to use things – like clothes, games, music, or even logos on lap­tops – to say, “This is who I am.”

In fact, Seit­er said 68 per­cent of con­sumers say they share con­tent to show who they are, while 78 per­cent say it’s to strength­en rela­tion­ships, as in, “I won­der what my friends will say about this?”

That, in turn, means con­tent designed for shar­ing can be extreme­ly spe­cif­ic, Seit­er said. She uses the exam­ple of BuzzFeed’s 38 Things Min­nesotans Are Too Nice to Brag About. Even though it is super-spe­cif­ic, it’s huge­ly share­able because those that can relate to it imme­di­ate­ly feel res­o­nance and can’t keep it to them­selves.

An addi­tion­al 62 per­cent of con­sumers say they share for social cur­ren­cy, mean­ing oth­ers turn to them as experts. In order to cre­ate con­tent with social cur­ren­cy, Seit­er said mar­keters must “attack the tak­en-for-grant­ed,” such as The Dress did with our col­lec­tive notion of col­or.

Relationship Building

“We can love brands as much as we love friends,” Seit­er said.

Stud­ies have demon­strat­ed that when con­sumers are shown pho­tos of part­ners and friends along with beloved brands, the reac­tion to the brand is not quite on par with the love for a part­ner, but it can be equiv­a­lent to that of a friend, she said.

This means there’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for mar­keters to embrace aspi­ra­tional mes­sag­ing and make con­sumers feel like they are part of a com­mu­ni­ty and have a role to play, she not­ed. Brands like Gatorade with its Be Like Mike cam­paign, as well as Lego, which asks con­sumers to share ideas for Lego sets on its Lego Ideas page, and Coke with its #MakeI­tHap­py cam­paign, which launched with a Super Bowl spot and the inten­tion of spurring online pos­i­tiv­i­ty, make con­sumers feel like they have a role to play in some­thing big­ger, she said.

There’s also poten­tial­ly an oppor­tu­ni­ty for mar­keters to tap into the fre­quen­cy of social behav­ior.

Per Seit­er, 44 per­cent of con­sumers go to Face­book once a day to like con­tent while 29 per­cent like con­tent mul­ti­ple times a day. This, Seit­er said, is par­tial­ly attrib­ut­able to rela­tion­ship main­te­nance.

“It’s a nod that says, ‘I see you and I know what you’re doing. We’re still close. We’re still friends,’” she said. “There’s a reci­procity effect.”

But that doesn’t mean brands should go over­board with con­tact: 23 per­cent of con­sumers say they believe they have a rela­tion­ship with a brand, but only 13 per­cent say fre­quent inter­ac­tions are the rea­son why.

“[Con­sumers] were far more like­ly to say shared val­ues were the way they saw cre­at­ing a rela­tion­ship with a brand,” Seit­er said.

The Biggest Opportunities For Marketers

Here are Seiter’s big three mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties.

1. Selfies

There are 300 mil­lion pho­tos on Insta­gram tagged with #self­ie, she said.

His­tor­i­cal­ly, only those who were wealthy enough could afford to have por­traits of them­selves com­mis­sioned, so there is some­thing about pow­er in har­ness­ing your own image via self­ies today. But Seit­er said the attrac­tion to tak­ing self­ies is also about fig­ur­ing out who we are. She points to the con­cept of the “look­ing glass self,” in which we can nev­er get a com­plete pic­ture of our­selves.

“We need that feed­back,” Seit­er said. “Self­ies are a way of cre­at­ing that atmos­phere where we can get that feed­back.”

In addi­tion, con­sumers sim­ply like faces. Per Seiter’s fig­ures, pho­tos with faces are 38 per­cent more like­ly to get likes and 32 per­cent more like­ly to get com­ments. Faces also guide our gaze online, so they’re a great way to point con­sumers to impor­tant infor­ma­tion, she adds. In addi­tion, faces cre­ate empa­thy. Seit­er said research has shown faces in patient files have actu­al­ly led doc­tors to treat those patients dif­fer­ent­ly.

This means there’s a ton of oppor­tu­ni­ties for mar­keters, such as with brand­ed self­ie sta­tions or sim­ply ask­ing con­sumers to sub­mit their own self­ies in a giv­en cam­paign.

“You can use them to human­ize the brand,” Seit­er said. “The empa­thy they cre­ate can’t be over­stat­ed.”

2. Emoji

Sev­en­ty-four per­cent of con­sumers use emo­ji reg­u­lar­ly and 6 bil­lion emo­jis are shared every day.

“When talk face to face, we mim­ic each other’s facial expres­sions,” Seit­er said. “Online, we didn’t have a way to do this until emo­jis.”

This, in turn, has result­ed in a new brain pat­tern in which we see the smi­ley face emo­ji and react the same way we do when we see a human face.

“Our mood changes,” Seit­er said.

In addi­tion, as the num­ber of emo­jis ris­es, slang also falls, so emo­jis are chang­ing our lan­guage pat­terns as well, she notes.

In par­tic­u­lar, emo­jis can help dis­tin­guish emails when used in sub­ject lines. MailChimp even did a study of the top 15 emo­jis by sub­ject line, find­ing the reg­is­tered trade­mark and smi­ley face emo­jis among the most pop­u­lar.

In addi­tion, play­ers like Ikea, Coke, Burg­er King, and Com­e­dy Cen­tral have put out their own brand­ed emo­jis.

“If you tap into self-iden­ti­ty, peo­ple don’t see it as adver­tis­ing, they see it as part of their self-expres­sion,” Seit­er said.

3. Nostalgia

Nos­tal­gia is also some­thing of a uni­ver­sal feel­ing in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing in part because things change so quick­ly.

Seit­er said con­sumers are more like­ly to give mon­ey to a cause or pay for a prod­uct that is adver­tised with nos­tal­gia. That’s part of the rea­son Face­book launched its On This Day fea­ture, which rein­serts mem­o­ries into news feeds.

In addi­tion, she said Insta­gram is about ide­al­iz­ing a moment and cre­at­ing nos­tal­gia the instant a pho­to is tak­en.

“We speed up the process of nos­tal­gia,” Seit­er said.

Miller Lite has employed nos­tal­gia in its throw­back pack­ag­ing, which raised sales; the Mad Libs app has 5.5 mil­lion down­loads; and col­or­ful design­er Lisa Frank teamed up with Urban Out­fit­ters to cre­ate “rare vin­tage notepads.”

“The ‘90s are nos­tal­gic now,” Seit­er said. “You don’t have to have hun­dreds of years of brand his­to­ry to be nos­tal­gic. Just find what the audi­ence is nos­tal­gic for and tap into that.”

Which social behav­ior do you think mar­keters can cap­i­tal­ize upon best? Why?