How Psychological Processes Affect Your Success on Social Media
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As someone who’s studying and working towards being a professional media practitioner, I have to be aware of how I will persuade my audience through strategically crafted messages. But I must also be cognizant of how this audience will perceive these messages. Within mass communication research, there is what is called the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) which explains that individuals process information through either a central or peripheral route.
According to Rosenberg and Vicker (2017), those who follow the central route rely heavily on prior experiences and knowledge to understand and analyze the given message. The individuals who follow this route are also less likely to change their thoughts on the subject. While those on the peripheral route form their ideas based on inferences or associations like celebrity endorsements and their views can often sway depending on a variety of factors. Overall, an audience who is more interested in the subject is more likely to take the central route of processing, and those who are not as interested process the message in a peripheral way.
Knowing about the ELM allows media practitioners to craft their messages in a way that will best persuade their target audience and give them an understanding of how to implement this model between various mediums. Research has shown that audiences tend to follow the central route when consuming and processing print media sources than media on T.V. or radio. But what about content that is produced for social media platforms?
Well, both of these routes work hand in hand with each other. As I previously mentioned, the peripheral route sort of includes distractions or outside sources to play a role in the persuasion. With social media being a visual form of media, this opens the door for a more superficial mindset while consuming content. With that social media, professionals should be aware of how celebrity endorsements, visual aesthetics, and the mood of the content can affect the persuasiveness of their message.
For me personally, I aim to be aware of how my target audience prefers to be communicated with. This is obviously a given for any successful social media strategy, but beyond that, I hope to implement my knowledge on this model in order to prevent any of my target audience from going astray or losing interest in our messaging.
When given the opportunity to work professionally in social media, I aim to strive to keep my audience interested, up-to-date, and knowledgeable about the given topic within the content. In order to do this successfully, I would first need to become an expert on my target audience — getting to know their needs, psychographic information, and their media consumption habits. By doing this, I hope that my audience would often lean into the more central route processing, but I will keep an open mind to the peripheral route since both processes have been proven to show the success of attitudes being changed.
