Social Media Marketing Tips From Facebook’s Mood Manipulation Study

Facebook’s massive mood manipulation study may have stirred up debate about the ethical nature of the research, but its findings are of incredible value for digital marketers. The major takeaway for marketers is that each user’s social content is strongly influenced by the mood of that user’s News Feed. Overall, the findings offer several social media marketing tips that marketers can use to improve their own strategies.

The study skewed the content of about 700,000 Facebook users’ feeds to display content that was either heavily positive or heavily negative in nature. According to Facebook, that manipulated content pushed those users to create content that was similarly skewed—users exposed to predominantly positive content were much more likely to post updates with a positive tone, and vice versa.

In other words, Facebook wields incredible influence over its users. Even when Facebook is not intentionally altering content to affect users’ moods, the content featured in a Facebook user’s feed clearly has the ability to affect his or her mood, both on Facebook and into the physical world.

This capacity to alter user behavior confirms the social network’s status as a powerful marketing platform. Marketers now have even further proof that their content has the capacity to influence consumers, whether they’re trying to spur on shopping behaviors, promote political issues or campaigns, or otherwise influence a digital audience.

To a large extent, these results were what Facebook was looking for. As Relevance Contributor Kevin Bailey notes, Facebook is still working to prove the influencing power of its ad network in contrast to traditional advertising platforms. The social network has its sights set on the billions of traditional ad dollars currently being spent, and it is hoping to offer sufficient evidence that would persuade those brands to divert some of that spending toward Facebook itself.

“But this tipping point won’t happen until Facebook proves that their new breed of newsfeed advertising is more powerful than tried and true traditional advertising channels like television,” writes Bailey. “This study goes a long way in helping prove this.”

If the results of Facebook’s study hold up in practice, it means content marketers need to be very conscious of what content they post online. Even subtle differences in the content’s tone could change how it is received by consumers and, in turn, how those consumers respond behaviorally.

These insights also come as social media consumption hits an all-time high. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of all online adults in the United States are active on at least one social network. An incredible 71 percent of all online adults have an active Facebook account, representing the vast majority of those socially active adults. Roughly 40 percent are on multiple social networks.

Consumers aren’t likely to tolerate mood manipulation from Facebook itself, but marketers would be crazy if they didn’t start to reconsider how their own content is influencing consumer moods. Whether striving for positive tones or direct calls-to-action, digital marketers want to craft social content that will affect their audience with the same attitudes and behaviors.