The Effects of Emotional Contagion on Social Marketing

Facebook has a section in their privacy and data sharing agreements that some people will find awesome, and most people will find terrifying: If a researcher has funding to replicate a published study, Facebook will give them open access to their user data. How could a researcher resist access to hundreds of millions of people’s psychologies, buying behaviors, schedules, and pictures, all untainted by a laboratory setting? There is some pioneering observations into the potential scientific use of social media data in predictive analytics, such as this post from Carlo Fiore.

The answer is that researchers seem somehow uninterested in Facebook’s proposition. It was a struggle to find any studies that took advantage of this wealth of data, and an even bigger struggle to find results that can be applied to digital marketing.

But I did find one with interesting implications. The study DetectingEmotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks by Lorenzo Coviello, Yunkyu Sohn, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Massimo Franceschetti, Nicholas A. Christakis, and James H. Fowler, used Facebook’s user data to determine whether or not negative and positive sentiments spread throughout users’ networks, and if so, which one was more contagious.

The way the researchers designed the experiment was simple and brilliant. They would find a highly populated area that was experiencing rainfall. They then monitored the friends of the people in this area, but only the friends who lived in a location where it wasn’t raining.

The researchers then compared the mood histories of users in both locations, and determined that rain increased negative posts and decreased positive posts by a statistically significant amount. In addition to this, every positive post increased the likelihood of a friend posting something positive, and the same with negative posts, regardless of whether or not the friend was in the rainy area.

There are already marketing campaigns that leverage weather targeting to deliver ads. But incorporating research like this into like-minded campaigns can yield even greater opportunities for personalizing ads. If your users are likely to be feeling positive, encourage that with your content. If your users are in conditions that are likely to make them feel sad, identify the conditions that might be having this effect, and try to counteract them with your messaging. People will be far more forgiving of you violating their privacy and manipulating their emotions if you do it all to help bring a smile to their face.