The Narcissistic Principle: Why We Share in Social Media

There’s a nar­ciss­ist­ic prin­ciple behind all social shares.

In this short blog art­icle, I’ll demon­strate why brands should think dif­fer­ently about their social media copy.

To begin, we will take a closer look at the psy­cho­logy behind why we share on social media.

Let’s go:

Why We Share on Social Media

When we share on social media, we share for a reas­on. And that reas­on typ­ic­ally has some­thing to do with ourselves.

And so on.

And most of us get this. As humans, why would we do any­thing if it does­n’t do any­thing for us?

Prompts for Self-Expression

The kick­er is that most brand updates are miss­ing the point of this nar­ciss­ist­ic prin­ciple. They use up all the oxy­gen, so there’s noth­ing left for any­one to add.

Look at this tweet where I’ve replied:

I’m being manip­u­lated by the nar­ciss­ist­ic prin­ciple here. The ori­gin­al tweet is bait­ing for people to reply. I’m try­ing to sig­nal that I’m smart here, but that’s not the case.

The tweet is most likely sent out by a Russian bot aim­ing to ignite divi­sion. Like a noob, I reacted, try­ing to be funny.

The psy­cho­lo­gic­al power of tweets like these is how they’re designed to be prompts for self-expres­sion. Brand updates in social media prac­tic­ally nev­er do this.

The Narcissistic Principle for Brands

So, we rarely share cor­por­ate mes­sages on our social net­works. Not because brands have noth­ing inter­est­ing to say but because they’re doing a good job of ensur­ing everything is being said.

To run a DIY exper­i­ment, I col­lec­ted 100 social media updates re-shared by a user. Out of these, 86 updates included added share com­ments where the users expressed some­thing about themselves.

I then col­lec­ted a smal­ler sample of branded social media updates without shares. I tried to think of what my share com­ment would be — if I were to share these tweets. Nothing came to mind.

So, what to do?

Look at your brand’s social media copy. If someone were to share your update in their feeds, would it be easy to instantly add share com­ments to express themselves?