Miracle in Social Media Psychology

Why user psychology?

• Social media are user-centric and facilitate social practices
• It is not what the social media site or platform does, bu
• t what the user sees, feels, thinks, and anticipates, that matters most
• User experience is effectively the social media company’s brand, identity, product, and service
• A social media site’s ability to captivate, keep, and sustain user attention, and so serve its business needs, hangs on the user’s own sense of his or her participation.
  

Social Media Realities

Users are people

• People perceive
• People think
• People feel
• People act
• People react
• People expect and anticipate
• People communicate
• People relate
• People desire
• People acknowledge

Social Media Realities

• Non - interactive media do not involve the user in their production
• Movies “suspend disbelief” and create a reality through sense-perceptions, out of moving pictures and sound (immersion, action, surprise, suspense, replacing thought with immediacy)
• Books captivate the reader’s imagination and allow him or her to build a reality through mental experience (fantasy, projection, logic, reasons and abstractions, distance)
• Music holds the listener’s attention in time, unfolding in the foreground or background, and has special impact when it is recognizable and familiar (recognition, memory, and recollection, “being there again”)

Production of Social Objects

Successful Social Media

• Leverage common media narratives and forms, to make content available to users for their own references and purposes
• These forms are social: they communicate and can be used to communicate, represent, identify, signify and so on
• Users bring media to life, media bring users to life
• Social media construct realities their users help to produce
• Users can believe in the reality of these social objects, and their significance to other usersand can become interested in the objects or in their owners and creators
• Because social media depend on users to provide content as a byproduct of acting, doing, talking, sharing, asking, answering, and navigating, how they structure the user experience = user engagement
• Engaged users will participate, and their participation creates value: content, communication, profiles, connections, preferences and tastes, and so on
• Engaged users participate because they want to, are compelled to, interested to, in short, motivated to participate
• Users will put into a site, and expect from it, according to how it structures social interactions, objects, information: its World

Social Media Experiences

• Social media are the productions of their users
• Social media engage the mental, emotional, psychological, and relational interests of their users.
• Users see, feel, and act:
• User Perceptions: create a visible and believable world
• User Affects: engage the feelings and motivations of users
• User Engagement: provide a means to relate feelings to acts and action
• User Satisfaction: satisfy complex user interests through social experience

User Perceptions

• Social media create or construct a social reality
• Users:
• see themselves in it
• see others in it
• see what they and others do in it, the results of their actions
• see what their activities are about
• see social scenes, and themselves as participants
• see themselves being seen

User Affects

• Users have affects, or feelings, moods, dispositions, attitudes, which are experienced “alone.” Because we are social beings, we experience affects even when interactions are mediated.
• Users experience affects:
• such as inclinations, tendencies, interests, desires
• curiosities, surprise, excitement, humor, comedy
• trepidation, anxiety, hesitation, doubt
• concern, caring, touch, recognition

Capturing Interest

• Social media realities engage user interests, to varying degrees, and in various modes, according to the activity and social practice they facilitate
• This means not just making something interesting, but captivating the user’s own interests
• Furthermore, users come to a social media site or service with their own interests already
• A well-structured social media brand permits the user to see into it, to involve him or herself, to become interested in others, and to take pleasure in their own involvement
• A social media site succeeds when its users invest in it as they would in any social practice, which means that its technology, features, functionality, and design become transparent
• The user’s interests are his or her motivation
• User has interests:
• in him or herself
• in his or her appearance to others
• in others
• in their actual or potential relationship to him/her