Why don’t users share your product on WeChat Moments?

The six factors of social currency, incentives, emotions, publicity, use value and stories are the theories for dissecting a reference-level perfect sharing and communication. As long as a sharing threshold is reached, any one factor (or multiple factors) may contribute to the user's sharing behavior.

We will first analyze it from the perspective of sharing and dissemination, and then delve deeper into a specific industry.

1. Social Currency

Users tend to share things they see that are beneficial to them, which is their social currency value.

Factors that determine user sharing behavior:

• Whether you can get more positive comments and impressions from your social circles such as family, friends and colleagues
• Can it make people look better (rich, fashionable, smart, humorous, etc.)
• Can it become the most direct symbolic signal for judging identity, preferences and labels?

Therefore, users like to share things that make them very happy rather than bored, so as to make themselves look more clever and savvy rather than stupid and dull - roughly the same as our saying "don't air your dirty laundry in public".

Going deeper into the matter: the unconventional is perceived as an event that is beyond imagination and attracts attention.

Because it is novel, surprising, stimulating and thought-provoking, it is extraordinary and can attract more frequent discussions. To add to that, mystery and controversy have the same effect.

2. Causes

If sharing and communication is compared to a traffic city, then the entrance through this traffic is the inducement, and such traffic entrances are numerous and hidden.

If your brand name is "Thursday", then every Thursday will be the biggest traffic entrance. Such traffic entrances are hard to come by, and what is more convenient is to broaden and explore traffic entrances.

For example, the concept of combination association, beer and fried chicken is a classic example. Combining beer and fried chicken together, whether it is through the traffic entrance of beer that you associate it with fried chicken, or through the traffic entrance of fried chicken that you associate it with beer, the publicity effect will be extremely popular.

Emotions

Emotions: Horizontally, they are divided into positive emotions and negative emotions, and vertically, they are divided into high-arousal emotions and low-arousal emotions. In theory, positive emotions are easier to share and spread than negative ones, and high-arousal emotions are easier to share and spread than low-arousal ones.

High Arousal:

• Positive: awe, amusement, excitement, humor
• Negative: Angry, worried

Low wake-up:

• Positive: Satisfied
• Negative: Sad

IV. Publicity

Some things are meant to be seen by others; this is their public visibility.

Compared to invisible ideas, visual things lower the threshold for open discussion and sharing. Since this is the case, please let it be seen by more people.

If you want something to be widely shared and spread, make it as visible as possible. For example: hidden and invisible thoughts are expressed through behavior and transformed into public and visible ones.

Things can be imitated because they are publicly visible. When we are uncertain, the situation is unclear or ambiguous, or there is a lot of room for surprise, we are most likely to feel that other people's behavior is the most correct and stands out in an unfamiliar environment, which is called imitation. This is called social identity (or social proof) in psychology.

Create behavioral residuals, which are a kind of physiological experience that remains in the body after people wake up from their behavior.

5. Practical Value

The above points are all based on the perspective of the sharer, and this point is aimed at the recipient.

Sharing and transmitting information is the connecting effect of modern society and a new form of social interaction that has evolved from traditional collective labor. Essentially it requires processes that save the recipient of the information time and money, and help them have a better experience.

Therefore, people like to share practical information, that is, information that others can use.

Normalized value measures the cost-effectiveness, while abnormal value measures the extended value beyond expectations, and the value beyond the expected period is more popular among sharers. Of course, value without enforceability will be shelved.

Let’s analyze value from the psychological perspective of scarcity:

• The rarer the opportunity, the higher its value
• The fear of losing something good seems to motivate people more than the desire to gain the same thing.
• Reverse psychology theory: the desire to maintain vested interests
• Quickly and accurately judge the value of something based on how easy it is to obtain it
• Because something is forbidden, it becomes more valuable
• New scarcity makes the scope of application more urgent
• The feeling of participating in the competition for scarce resources is highly stimulating

Practical value is the easiest and most commonly applied of the six factors.

6. Story

Stories have a magical power. They are a form of communication that has been passed down from ancient times to the present day. Like blood in blood vessels, they can effectively carry information and pass it smoothly to the next individual.

From a propaganda perspective, advertising is full of skeptical and persuasive language.

Users need to spend time and energy analyzing what information delivered through advertisements is credible and what is not. Coupled with the long-term problem of advertisement fulfillment, it is ultimately difficult for people to believe. Stories, as a buffer, alleviate this problem well, providing people with the information they need in a way that is most easily accepted and remembered.

The six factors are the theory for dissecting a reference-level perfect sharing communication. As long as a sharing threshold is reached, any one factor (or multiple factors) may contribute to the user's sharing behavior.

The above is the behavioral analysis of sharing communication and psychology.

Below, let’s go one line deeper and give an example. (To stick to the topic, we will only analyze from the sharing level)

Let’s take the issue of takeout (don’t go into it too much, just mention it briefly). The takeout industry is a new branch of the catering industry, and its competitors are high-end restaurants and homemade food. Due to its rapid development speed and changes, it is necessary to examine it from the perspective of dynamic development.

It is undeniable that in the early days of the rise of takeout, under the mainstream communication trend dominated by capital and participated by the media, takeout was an unconventional thing, novel and outstanding, and it received frequent attention. Subsidies from the platform and merchants provide tangible practical value. Based on this, it is enough to trigger the threshold for a large number of users to share and spread. At this point, the social currency value of takeout is stronger than that of high-end restaurants and homemade food.

However, things are different now. Judging from the fact that most of the food shared on WeChat Moments comes from a certain restaurant, the social currency value of takeout is weaker than that of high-end restaurants and homemade food.

The reasons may (but not necessarily) be as follows:

1. As capital and media attention shifted, the practical value of subsidies decreased, and the popularity of food delivery increased, making food delivery a routine activity and losing its strong social currency attributes.
2. The social stereotype curve regresses and becomes dominant. It is difficult for takeout users to give people a more positive impression. They are often seen as homebodies, lazy, and unable to take care of themselves.
3. It is difficult to reject the identity of a loser for takeout users.

Let’s return to the practical value of takeout itself: time, money, and better experience.

There is no doubt that the development of the takeout industry has improved social efficiency and saved time for users. But the value of time is difficult to measure, and because it is wasteful, it is often filtered out by the user’s brain (you are so lazy that you can order takeout, how can this be counted?).

As for the food delivery industry, whether it saves users money or not, going directly to the store and ordering food online will tell us the truth, but "The Crowd" tells us that the crowd never cares about the truth. Users neither look at the short-term nor the long-term, they only look at the present moment. With less subsidies, they spend more money. From the psychological perspective of scarcity, users are more sensitive to the lost value.

As for the experience, from a professional gourmet perspective, the preparation of gourmet food is definitely a complex and regular dietary art. Pay attention to the ingredients (type and quality), ingredient processing (washing, cutting, seasoning), cooking methods (frying, frying, sticking, cooking, deep-frying, sautéing, stir-frying, boiling, stewing, simmering, roasting, braising, boiling, stewing, simmering, steaming, braising, sauce, smoking, roasting, sautéing, pickling, mixing, pulling silk, baking), cooking utensils (pots, spatulas, knives, etc.), cooking techniques (knife skills, adding ingredients, starching, coating with batter, controlling the heat, thickening and pouring sauce, controlling the time and amount of seasoning, flipping the spoon and serving), and cooking experience.

The above is just to point out that cooking is definitely not a simple technical job.

It can be seen from this that the limitations of takeout are quite obvious. Time is a hurdle that cannot be crossed. The dining experience is not better, and at least it is worse than the traditional one.

In summary: the practical value of the takeout industry still exists, but its overall practical value is decreasing and is quite sensitive, one positive and one negative. As for the triggers, they are mostly the same as usual: rain, sun, laziness, red envelopes, etc. The only emotion that takeout can evoke in people is probably low-arousal satisfaction.

As for publicness, as can be seen from the above, the scope of publicness of takeout is shrinking. The easiest thing to feel is that people may still eat, but they will no longer share and talk about it as usual.

Story? Capital likes to listen to stories, but never tells them.

What? Want to get a little more specific? Okay, let’s analyze an interesting product, one that doesn’t follow the routine.

What is this little thing? What is disposable chewing gum? Is there a reusable chewing gum? No matter how you look at it, this thing has nothing to do with chewing gum, right?

Maybe you will find it novel and surprised, and try hard to think about it and want to uncover its mystery. This is its intrinsic social currency value.

My subconscious mind tells me that this thing that subverts common sense must have some unknown secrets. If you want to find out the truth like me, then it successfully arouses the excitement of curiosity and the awe of the truth in your heart.

Through the positive and negative content, we can analyze the incentives it leaves for users to share:

1. chewing gum, because it looks the least like chewing gum;
2. "Shock" its word;
3. Catering takeaway, it is a combined associative concept with catering takeaway;
4. After the meal, because it uses the positioning of the scene;
5. WeChat , its design concept is the WeChat chat box on the front and the circle of friends on the back.

Perhaps you did not expect that such a small product could be so well aware of so many incentives. It is not simple.

Compared with traditional chewing gum, let’s take a look at its practical value:

• Save time and think in terms of what you want as the starting point and what you get as the end point. If you bring your own traditional chewing gum, buy it in advance, place it, and get it after the meal. Compared with the takeaway accessories, it has 3 more steps
• To save money, the group will only think about the immediate value. Obviously, the one with lower single experience cost is more acceptable.
• For a better experience, let’s just start from the visuals we can see . Its visual design is more modern and familiar. Compared with traditional chewing gum exposed to the air, the disposable packaging gives people a sense of visual safety.

Of course, the executable part can reflect the value itself. The reduction in unit costs also lowers the threshold for value execution and can better demonstrate the charm of value itself.

Story: I think the story is an ordinary one. Although it is so ordinary that it is abandoned by people, it is extremely true. Like, “I want to be a good person.”

How would the visibility of such a product compare to traditional chewing gum?

Let us leave this suspense, because the answer is not with me, but with you.

I won’t reveal who it is. In this impetuous period, life needs more mysteries that we can't help but reveal and surprises that we can't help but explore.

above.

Source: lshake