The theory of nostalgia and Australia's biggest Page

The biggest Australian Facebook Brand Page is Bubble O'Bill Ice Cream with over 850,000 fans, maybe a little surprising at first as they do not seem to have a strong brand or digital leaning. However one explanation for this is nostalgia.

According to the great blog Psychology of video games which looked at nostalgia in videos games,

‘Research suggests that we engage in nostalgia because it has psychological benefits. It makes us happy and improves our state of mind, especially when we need that kind of mental pick-me-up.’

We seem to engage in nostalgia specifically to make us feel better suggests that we may be unconsciously biased towards remembering things that make us happy and against remembering the things that don’t. We have a remarkable propensity towards that kind of thing.

An additional wrinkle in memory’s landscape is that the emotional footprints of positive memories tend to fade more slowly than those of negative ones.'

So it is good news for you if you have a nostalgic brand.

Soap Creative who look after the Bubble O Bill Page just came out with a great Dummies guide for Facebook Pages that is well worth a read.

Facebook Brand Pages For Dummies

View more presentations from Soap Creative.

The rise of the Digital Cypher

I love Youtube Highest Rated Comments.

One interesting side effect to this is the increase in “digital cyphers”. A digital cypher is when Youtubers freestyle rap in the comments section over the music video clip that is playing, usually these are over instrumental beat to a famous song (examples here here here). Highest rated comments motivates people to rap comments as the best ones will be ‘liked’ and go to the top of the page and showcased to everyone else who is viewing that video.