Today’s article begins with a question I ask you, simple and immediate. Turn on your imagination for a moment: Imagine you are in a city you don’t know, it’s lunchtime and you are hungry. As you walk you come across two restaurants you have never been to. You look inside each one: one is full of people eating, chatting and enjoying their lunch. The other, however, is empty. So, without thinking twice, which one would you enter? Which of the two restaurants inspires more confidence in you? I use this example to introduce the concept of “ social proof ,” which Robert Cialdini, a scholar of the psychology of persuasion.
Has defined roughly as follows:
This is the psychological-social phenomenon underlying the spread of fashions. People tend to follow what “the majority” does. Obviously, right? And what role does the quality of what is served have in all of this? The user’s point of view The same thing happens when a web user has to choose an online service or has to decide whether or not to read a content, whether or not to share it. Unconsciously , he very often asks himself some questions: How many social shares does this page have? Are there reviews from other users?
How many comments and views are there
In essence: how many other people have appreciated Tizio… in some way instead of Caio? [And Twitter deleted them for budget reasons – see also “ digiday.com/platforms/twitter-removes-social-share-counts-share-buttons-frustrating-publishers/ “] The japan email list answers to these questions are automatically provided by the explicit numbers or explicit opinions that people find on the various online pages, in the blink of an eye. An easy example: just look at Facebook, the fan pages with maps and reviews. The fact that in the screenshot I report relating to a restaurant, over 3,000 people have already been located gives a clear signal to users that this place is perhaps worth a visit.
Fb reviews all this to express my opinion
AGAINST those (and there are many) who believe that numbers, views, online do not mean anything . They underline how only the quality of the contents counts: that, and only that, moves users to targets who will make the necessary views. In my opinion, numbers really matter, in fact they are everything. Like it or not, a cycle like this happens online: 1. THE USER ENCOUNTERS A WEB PAGE Online users don’t have the time and often not even the skills to understand and compare similar content (or sites): they simply rely on simple, instantly usable data , such as the number of shares, views, subscribers, fans and followers.
2. THE USER TAKES A POSITIVE ACTION TOWARDS THAT PAGE The user who encounters a page or service with sufficient elements of social proof – if he finds himself faced with the answer to his need ( looking for a service, looking for information, finding information to share , etc.), tends to interact positively with that web page / social channel . This tendency is higher the higher the elements of social proof are (or the stronger, in his mind, the authority / brand of the channel that is spreading that content). It doesn’t matter if there is content around that better meets his needs: he doesn’t have the time nor is it relevant to find them. 3. THE MORE USERS INTERACT, THE MORE OTHERS WILL INTERACT.
A virtuous circle is triggered:
a large mass of users interacting with web content stimulates other users to interact, triggering a “viral process”. The quality of the content? 4. MANY AND REPEATED INTERACTIONS CONTRIBUTE TO AUTHORITY If the contents of that person/company are appreciated country email database so many times, this person or company will acquire more and more authority: this authority will be transmitted to all its contents , because they come from a source considered reliable. The quality of the information or services sold? Once again certainly indispensable, but not so obvious…
In this very interesting discussion in
Giorgio Tave’s forum , a reference in web marketing, almost everyone agrees that views and subscribers of a YouTube channel – in the example cited – do not count for anything, because many other factors must be observed to establish the quality cz leads of a single view . Very true. But these are details that include industry experts, who are a small percentage in the Internet’s magnum sea . Those who see and appreciate such content mainly on the basis of numbers and opinions immediately visible on the channel or page, do not have the time or the finesse to identify certain factors . They decide whether they like what they have seen or not and – in this decision – the very banal number has a very strong impact.
