Less than 20% of social content on Facebook generated any kind of detectable emotional response. The study from CrowdEmotion and Havas Media examined respondents’ reactions to a newsfeed mock-up that included sponsored ads, posts on trending articles, and ‘more authentic’ friends’ stories. “None of the sponsored ads generated any emotional response – they were simply ignored. Shocking, offensive, amusing, and cute stories generated the most emotional response – all of them contained visual images. Men and women differed in their emotional response to some stories.”
The study suggests that “social content is becoming far too ‘tried and tested’ for users to engage and react… Social media feeds are becoming like wallpaper – with shorter attention spans and a greater need to be shocked, it’s harder than ever to make an impact in consumers’ lives.” However, a piece in Mediapost questions whether “simply upping the intens-o-meter is a durable strategy in the long run. For one thing it would probably trigger an online creative content arms race, with more and more marketers producing ever more outlandish or outrageous video to cut through the clutter, resulting in consumers becoming inured to ‘intense’ video content altogether.”
Read the executive summary or the Mediapost article.
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