The Psychology and Science Behind Inbound Marketing

Wrapping up the first day at PubCon, I attended a two in one deal with Jabez Lebret and Dan Zarrella. The following is a recap of the key takeaways.

The Psychology of Facebook Conversion with Jabez Lebret

In this session Jabez Lebret revealed how to leverage social sharing, from a cognitive perspective. The key takeaway here, is to remember that people engage in social media because it’s a tribal way to connect.

• The average Facebook user has less than 200 “friends” – those are the friends they know and trust, the people they want to share information with.
• When we start thinking about developing our communication strategies, we need to realize we’re asking them to share this information with their tribe – which is psychologically a lot.
• People post because of their ego (sharing about ourselves): pictures, travel, food, news
• People post because of their tribe: pictures, family, childhood, local, kids.
• Narcissism – is a driver – in psychological sense, the term is used to describe both normal self love and unhealthy self absorption due to a disturbance in the sense of self.

When we think about positioning our brands, we have to cater to what is driving their interaction. If we are not giving them the opportunity to do what they want to do by nature, we are making it difficult for them. Make it easy for people to share!

The Science of Inbound Marketing with Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarrella starts off by going against the grain, “Engage in the conversation! Be a personality!” is stuff that is basically rainbows and unicorns. In this session, we’re about to break down the science.

Twitter

• The people who are most likely to RT, also have the highest number of followers. These people spend less time engaging in conversation, and more time hitting RT. If you give them something of value to RT, your message will reach a bigger audience.
• If 60-80% of your tweets are links, you’ll get more retweets. The more you’re engaging on Twitter, the fewer RTs you’ll get.
• If you use the call to action, “please retweet” you will get more RTS. Calls to action work!
• Tweets scheduled between 4-6pm EST get more RTs than tweets posted earlier in the day, because you’re getting lazy and it’s easier to hit RT.

Ebooks

• People prefer ebooks in the following format (most to least): Kindle, PDF, HTML.
• People prefer to read eBooks that are over 100+ pages or under 5 pages.

Facebook

• Posts made on Saturday and Sunday get a lot more likes than those in a weekday, and later in the day is also higher.
• Posting at peak times makes it harder for you to break through the noise
• The post type that gets the most likes (most to least): photos, status updates, video, links
• Don’t get stuck in the middle when writing Facebook posts, write them very short or very long.
• Facebook is kinda like the Jersey Shore, linguistically, the most shareable content is sexual, positive, learning, media, work constructive, and self reference. The least is negative, leisure, anxiety, numbers.

Let’s talk about SEO

• LinkedIn has the strongest relationship of “shares:links generated”
• Most linked title words (most to least): sports, breaking, music, free, fashion, news, technology, video, photo, official, best, tips, new, photography, etc.
• 9-10am blog posts are getting the most views, but posts published 6-7am get more links
• Monday blog posts get the most views, Saturday and Sunday gets the least
• Links by day of weeks (most to least): Monday, Thursday, Sunday

Email Marketing data pulled from Buzzstream 

• It’s safe to use an “&” in your subject line, because it’s perceived that you’re packing so much value into your subject line that you couldn’t fit it – it has a positive impact on open rate. The use of a question mark inhas a negative impact
• First name personalization is very strong, as is company name – personalize when you can
• Emails sent on Saturday an Sunday do much better than earlier in the week
• Emails sent 5-6am have the highest open rate