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Dan Zarrella

DanZarrella.com, Social & Viral Marketing Scientist

7 Social Media Marketing Lessons Learned from HypnosisJuly 26

For over a hundred years people from charlatans to respected academics have been studying the power and uses of hypnosis. Two forms have emerged recently as the most well-researched and effective: clinical hypno-therapy and stage hypnosis, in fact there are many therapists who dabble in entertaining stage hypnosis. As social media marketers, there are many lessons we can learn from the field of trance and suggestion, below are 7 of my favorite.

1. Suggestibility

Suggestibility is a measure of how inclined a person is to act on the suggestions of other people. Research has shown that there is a correlation between how suggestible a person is and how hypnotizeable a person is.
Stage hypnotists spend a lot of effort on identifying the most suggestible people in their audience to bring up on stage. They’ve developed a wide range of quick tests to highlight those people who will demonstrate their abilities to the rest of the crowd, making them more suggestible as well. Clinical practitioners also have tests and scales of sugge

How to Use Novelty to Create Contagious IdeasJuly 20

Every time I’ve looked at the contagiousness of ideas, be it online or off, one of the most frequent characteristics I come across is novelty. I’ve found that ReTweets tend to contain less common words than normal Tweets, and I’ve found that survey-takers highlight “news” as the most common type of content they share.

In 2007, researchers at the Hewlett-Packard’ s Information Dynamics Laboratory in Palo Alto studied social news site Digg and found that “novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.”

And Free University of Brussels research professor Francis Heylighen lists “novelty” as a criteria for a successful meme, saying “New, unusual or unexpected ideas or perceptions tend to attract the attention, and thus arouse the

Writing For Facebook? Use Nouns and VerbsJune 25

Many decades ago William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White told us to:

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.
The Elements of Style

And now we have the data to prove that they were right all along.

By analyzing my Facebook data set to study the relationship between parts-of-speech and Facebook sharing, I found that adjectives and adverbs don’t perform as well as regular, plain old nouns and verbs.

So re-read your Strunk & White and remember that when you’re writing for Facebook, use nouns and verbs.

The Least Shareable Words on FacebookMay 12

Continuing my series of Facebook data, here’s the flip side to last week’s post on the most shareable words on Facebook.

What I found was that techie and social-media dork favorite topics like Twitter, Google, and the iPhone aren’t very popular with the mainstream Facebook audience. These topics might be hot with the bleeding-edge Twitter crowd, but when you’re targeting the much larger Facebook audience, lay off the trendy web geek stuff.

If you want to know more about my dataset and methods, read this.

The Most Facebook-Shareable WordsMay 5

It’s another Facebook sharing data post.

I analyzed the words that occurred most often in titles in my dataset and their effect on Facebook sharing and found a set of “highly shareable” words.

What I found was that list-based superlatives like “best” and “most” work pretty well on Facebook and that contain that explains something “why” and “how” also does.

If you want to know more about my dataset and methods, read this.

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