Your ideal customers and would-be customers are on Social Media.
But if your posts don’t light up their brains with dopamine, they won’t engage with your brand.
Frustrating, isn’t it?
So, how do you get your ideal audience to engage on social?
At B2B Forum 2024, Brooke Sellas revealed the secret to brand engagement on social media. For Brooke’s insights, watch the video or read the transcript below.
And to increase your marketing engagement and attract buyers on any channel, join us at B2B Forum this November in Boston.
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Dopamine [a reward molecule, is released in the brain when someone gets] pleasure, reward, or motivation.
So you have to be thinking, as a brand, what brings my customers (or my would-be customers) pleasure?
Feelings, right? So we’re going to benefits, not to facts or features. What rewards my customers, or my would-be customers?
A lot of people surveyed, year-after-year, say that they follow brands on social media to receive discounts.
But a lot of brands that you see are so busy “storytelling”… that they’ve forgotten to reward their customers and would-be customers with discounts through social media.
And then also: motivation.
How do you bring motivation into what you do with your content on social, to motivate your customers and would-be customers to continue to come back?
So we know [dopamine is] a reward molecule.
We know that the social media platforms have exploited dopamine, and still kind of do in a way.
And we know that the changing triggers for users on social media is from quantity to quality.
That’s the foundation.
We also need to understand that the way users use social media has changed. Again, it’s old.
The way people are using it is new.
So today’s social media users are digital connoisseurs, right?
I’ve been using social media for around 20 years, so I kind of know how to make my way around Facebook and Twitter and whatever site that I choose to be on, which is mostly LinkedIn these days.
And then we also need to start talking about the silent observers, because these are the people who don’t click the like button…
But they do engage. Deeply.
And I want to start a movement. I want to stop calling them “lurkers.” Because really, these are just introverts and some of my favorite people are introverts.
So let’s stop calling them “lurkers,” and start calling them “silent observers.”
So, passion leads to profit.
Again, feelings are what’s going to get you to finance.
(I need to workshop that one a little bit more. “Passionate profits” sounds a lot better…)
But honestly, with the clients that we serve, the more we are sharing opinions and feelings, the more we are creating these experiences and dopamine spikes or hits, the more we’re breeding more conversation.
What happens when you have more conversation?
More people join the conversation.
When you have people commenting on your social media content, the algorithms also really love that. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that, when you have a post that maybe doesn’t have a lot of likes or shares, but it has a lot of conversation happening underneath it…
All of a sudden you get more and more reach, more and more impressions.
Every single one of the algorithms on every single one of the social media platforms has deep engagement like comments or conversations as a part of what they look at to share your content out more.
So that’s why a return on conversation is so important.
So, as we’re building our dopamine machine, we’re thinking about the conscious scroller. They’re looking for those authentic stories, but they’re also seeking value. How are you adding value?
You’re also thinking about the silent observers. These are the people who are lurking over liking, but they’re engaging deeply on your content.
You can look at stuff like click through rates to see how this is doing.
I’ll give you an example here. It’s not a great one, but we have this wonderful, fabulous, amazing client who’s a gastro doctor. So they do things like hemorrhoid banding and colonoscopies.
There’s not a lot of people coming on their content to talk about their colonoscopy and their hemorrhoid banding.
So what we look at instead are the silent observers.
Our click-through rate is so high on all of their content because we make sure that we’re educating the clients on these really-not-so-fun procedures, that they feel comfortable by the time they hit the doctor’s office. They know exactly how it’s going to go, from check-in until the time that they’re discharged.
So even though we don’t have deep engagement in the way of those conversations, we see it in other ways, through click-through.
Then I want you to think about trust dynamics, and I actually call these “trust-fluencers” in my world, but these are your influencers, your micro influencers, and peer-to-peer recommendations.
One of the things that I’m sure you’ve all seen is, when a page does a really good job of cultivating their community, somebody can come in and say something nasty?
And the brand doesn’t have to say anything at all.
The people come in and start being like, “you don’t even know what you’re talking about. You get out here with your negative vibes!”
Right?
That is exactly what we’re trying to get to, by cultivating our communities and followers on social media.
(I won’t get too into this, but I did my undergraduate thesis study on the “social penetration theory.” Terrible name, brilliant concept. Obviously not named by marketers.)
And what they said was, the way we build relationships and the way we get to trust is through disclosures, what they call “self disclosures.”
What those disclosures do is, basically, tell us how we get to know each other.
Clichés and facts—that’s where most B2B content lives.
Guess what you don’t do with cliché and fact content?
You don’t care! You’re not going to build a relationship. You’re not going to build trust. You’re not going to get those conversations going.
But when you start to share opinions and feelings through your content, either asking for it or soliciting your own point of view as a brand, that’s where you start to see those conversations happening.
That’s where relationships start to get formed.
And even though this was formed back in the seventies, by the way, way before social media existed, my undergraduate thesis looked at this theory on actual social media pages.
And what I found, over and over again, and it’s still true all these years later, is that the brands that focus on conversation through opinions and feelings, which we all can also call, I can slap the marketer term on it, if it’ll help your stakeholders just say, “collecting voice of customer data,” everybody will be like, “yay! Oh, you’re so smart!”
Yeah, it’s really just collecting opinions and feelings of your customers and would-be customers.
So if you want conversions—because all of you raised your hand with ROI—you need to stop building a follower base and start building a customer base on social media.
Because guess what?
The only people who are going to care about your content deeply, and engage with your content deeply, are your customers and your would-be customers.
So would you rather have a really tiny following that’s made up of customers and would-be customers?
Or would you rather have 10 million followers… and maybe three of them are buying your things?
Published Feb 6, 2025
MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2024 was our favorite yet. There was a buzz in the air that’s hard to explain. It’s like we all needed to be in those rooms together more than ever to combat the chaotic state of the world around us and how challenging B2B marketing has been since the last few years.
If you missed it, you can’t go back to get that feeling. But there is still a chance to catch the keynotes and all other recorded sessions to get the amazing insights our speakers shared. Attendees who were there and our PRO members get access to all recordings! So if you’re PRO, simply log in and get to watching. Or, upgrade to a PRO membership today for access. Recordings are available through March 31, 2025.
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