Six Consumer Psychology Principles to Help Build a Loyal Social Media Audience. Leverage these six consumer psychology principles to drive more engagement with your social media content and more loyalty to your business. View original article: https://blog.dlvrit.com/2015/08/6-consumer-behaviors-to-drive-customers/

1. Six Consumer Psychology Principles that you Should
‘NOT’ Ignore to Gain New Customers
blog.dlvrit.com/2015/08/6-consumer-behaviors-to-drive-customers/
Debra Garber
Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them ”. This
consumer behavior is why great marketing is critical. The best marketers understand what makes people
act, and how to use that understanding in campaigns, email marketing, social media content, and even
graphic design.
Consumer psychology is all about getting into that unconscious territory where people are
being directed to make purchases for reasons they are not clear about, states consumer
psychology expert, Michael Fishman.
Let’s examine Econsultancy’s six consumer psychology principles and the social media actions you can
take to leverage these principles to build up a larger and more loyal audience. These include:
1. Reciprocity
2. Information Gap Theory
3. Social Proof
4. Fear of Missing Out
5. Loss Aversion
6. Paradox of Choice

2. Principal #1 – Reciprocity. Feels good, doesn’t it?
Reciprocity – meaning mutual exchange.
Reciprocity is a psychological principle regarding a positive action that takes place in response to another
positive action. This principle suggests that one will return an act of friendship made by another.
How to use reciprocity in social media:
1 – Follow to be followed.
From Ryan Hanley’s post on just be awesome social media strategy:
Find ten to twenty blogs of thought leaders in your niche and connect with those people on the two
to three social media platforms you use the most. Then just participate.
Show interest in what they are saying by commenting on their post.
Add value to the discussion by sharing your personal experiences.
Be part of the solution that leads to achievement of their goals.
2 – Share great content, not just your own.
Share the content of other people BEFORE you ever share your own. Use social media to give value first
and build trust with others and in return they will help you spread your message
In general by being Awesome and sharing the awesome content of other people first you will
garner the attention of appreciation of these individuals who will RECIPROCATE!
Principal #2 -The secret to creating curiosity: Information Gap Theory.

3. Curiosity – a strong desire to know or learn something.
In psychology, the Information Gap Theory refers to the curiosity that humans develop if there is a gap
between the information they already know and the information they wish to know.
Developed by George Loewenstein back in the early 1990s, this theory suggests that when there is a gap
in knowledge, humans are triggered to take action to find what they want to know.
Loewenstein believes that curiosity proceeds in two basic steps:
First, a situation reveals a painful gap in our knowledge (that’s the headline)
Second, then we feel an urge to fill this gap and ease that pain (that’s the click)
How to use this curiosity in social media:
1 – The easiest way to do this is by creating eye-catching, attention-grabbing headlines.
Your headline and image grab attention. Curiosity, on the other hand, helps you keep attention! It’s
important to spark an interest that already exists within your audience:
Choosing the right topics to write about is essential.
Find something that your audience will want to know more about, and hand them the answer on a
plate.
Draw them in with the right headline and you have given them something great for free, taking us back to
the Reciprocity Theory.
Here’s a great article on why curiosity based headlines hook us in: Upworthy’s Headlines Are Insufferable.
Here’s Why You Click Anyway
Upworthy headlines are wildly effective. A recent web traffic chart reveals that Upworthy generated about
75,000 Facebook likes for each article. If that sounds impressive, get this: The second-best performing

4. site produced fewer than 10,000 likes.
Whatever you think of Upworthy, the power of curiosity-gap headlines is, possibly, peerless.
Principal #3 – Use social proof to encourage readership and downloads.
Content marketing and social proof work hand in hand. This theory proposes that people naturally
gravitate to a product that they know others already like and trust.
How to use social proof in social media:
1 – If you’re trying to grow your blog subscriber list, encourage them to subscribe:
“Join the 13,648 content marketers who subscribe to our blog!”
2 – Use social share counters on your blog posts.
Show readers and prospective readers how many people have already read and shared your article.
3 – Embed tweets from readers and share customer testimonials within your landing pages.

5. Principal #4 – Keeping up with the fear of missing out.
Fear of Missing Out (or FOMO, for short) is a part of the scarcity marketing theory. The thought is –
humans tend to put more value on things they feel are scarce and a lower value on anything that you can
easily obtain.
When people worry they can’t have something due to limited time or quantity, psychologically they will start
wanting it more. Also, in today’s world of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the like, we are all instantly
aware of the stuff we are missing out on.
How to use FOMO in social media:
1 – Show your customers that your content is rare and therefore, valuable.
If you have an e-book, make it free to download for a limited amount of time
If you have a newsletter, tell your customers that there is new content on your site that they have
the opportunity to see before anyone else.

6. When people worry they can’t have something due to limited time or quantity, psychologically they will start
wanting it more.
Principal #5 – Aversion to loss is more powerful than acquiring gains.
In economics and decision theory, loss aversion refers to the way people tend to prefer avoiding losses
than acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.
Whether a transaction is framed as a loss or as a gain is very important: would you
rather get a $5 discount, or avoid a $5 surcharge?
How to use loss aversion to your advantage in social media:
The best way to apply the loss aversion principle to your content marketing is to work out what exactly
makes your audience tick.
1 – Taylor your blog content to show your customers why your service or product will prevent them from
losing something important to them, like time or money.
2 –Use trial periods and rebates to take
advantage of the buyer’s tendency to be
wary of new things.
Principal #6 – Paradox of too many
choices – why less is more.
In the book The Paradox of Choice – Why
More Is Less, psychologist Barry Schwartz
argues that you can significantly reduce anxiety in a consumer by limiting the number of choices available.
Autonomy and Freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to
freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than
any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy,
we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically. —quoted from Ch.5, The Paradox of
Choice, 2004

7. The Paradox of Choice principle proposes that humans become less satisfied if they have too many
choices. People often struggle with important decisions, and when given too many choices, we often worry
later that a different option may have been better for us.
How to use the paradox of choice in social media:
1 – Keep your social media content clear and concise and don’t overwhelm your audience with too
many choices. When someone reads your content, ideally, you want the reader to take a further action.
Offer them two different options:
Share it
Read something similar (or related, popular or trending)
Goal: Avoid giving your audience too many options that result in them leaving your site.
For example, at the end of all our dlvr.it blog posts, we offer our audience two choices: ‘Share this’ or
‘Related’.
There are many factors to take into consideration when creating and implementing a successful social
media marketing strategy. Keeping these six consumer psychology principles in mind will help you focus
on your audiences’ thoughts and behavior, and most importantly, help you to stand out in a crowded
world of online marketing.