4ifsocialTraumatized persons have one thing in common: they feel disconnected. Trauma means nothing else than dissociating, i.e. disconnecting emotional parts, in order to survive and continue living in the best possible manner despite of what happened. There are multiple ways to get traumatized, and there‘s hardly a human being who doesn‘t have one or the other trauma in their life history.

In my opinion, social media has only been such an incredible success due to this fact. It makes people feel connected to the whole world, and that simply makes us feel better.

Sharing emotions with others is a basic human need: It makes us feel good and it makes us feel connected to others, to the world, to life. Social media simply takes advantage of this. If I feel better because I just posted a photo of the dinner I cooked, and 20 of my friends "liked" it, you could just think: „poor thing, doesn‘t have real-life friends, so the illusion of sharing something, anything makes her feel good“. On the other hand “social” does connect a lot of people and businesses and can be used for all sorts of great causes as well. And what difference does it make how you connect, as long as you do? And I don‘t just mean the clicking of a button on Facebook or Google+, I mean connecting emotionally, or business connections, or new ideas being born....

Social media marketing is trying to take advantage of all that. Most advertisements on social media pages get ignored, and yet there are always some campaigns that are immensely successful, and that‘s due to great content which causes a strong emotional reaction. And people like to share what makes them react emotionally.

The Metro Trains video "Dumb ways to die" was incredibly shared almost 42 million times. What‘s the recipe here? A really catchy tune and a good idea, just have a look for yourself:

And here are two more notable YouTube videos which show the possible power of social:

A successful social media campaign needs to touch people emotionally somehow, or be so shocking, outrageous, special or cute, that people find it worth sharing….or really, really useful.

So, show your idea to ten or twenty people, and if they react with: "wow, this is amazing, I need to tell my buddy about this ..." you‘re on the right track.

By Anjum Siddiqi