Bolster Your Presentation Skills with Some Clever Social Media Hacks

You will be more effective if you add some potent techniques from social science to your presentation style. Your audience will have no idea that you are using “mind-control” techniques, but that is exactly what you are doing. Here are Five Social Science Hacks to include in every presentation you do:

Map out audience needs and preferences. 

Arming yourself with critical information elevates your chances of connecting and persuading your key audience members. By using AI-powered Social Listening and Thematic Analysis, you can determine your audience's preferences and sentiment. So you will know whether you need to focus on creating an emotional bond, or to spend more time providing more technical detail. This will go a long way to determine if you are a success or a fail.

Get them to identify with you at the very start.

Providing a short anecdote at the beginning of your presentation that allows you laugh at yourself is a really effective tool to gain your audience’s trust. This is referred to as the Pratfall Effect, and this display of vulnerability automatically triggers the release of oxytocin in your audience’s brains, effectively creating emotional bonding and trust.

Build and present your information as an entertaining story.

Telling a story is not just a clever way to get through your content with style; it actually makes you more persuasive and memorable. That is because of the Narrative Transportation effect - where the story captures attention through entertainment, creates emotional empathy and helps the audience envision and accept your perspective in their brain.

Stop and Ask Your Audience For Their Opinion.

Breaking from your script to ask for the audience’s perspective is one of the most important things you can do. What happens is that you create Participatory Persuasion, which lowers your audience’s psychological resistance to your ideas, allows them to work through their questions and doubts, AND showcases their growing agreement. And this becomes contagious across the entire audience.

Close Your Presentation by Focusing on the Gain.

Ending your presentation with Next Steps is logical - but how you choose to do that is strategic. Use Social Framing to wrap the next steps in the positive outcomes of your presentation, rather than in the costs or effort conveyed through your presentation, and will make it required. This will be the culmination of the energy and enthusiasm you were transmitting through your presentation, and makes it much more likely that your audience will agree with your direction. They will be more likely to remember and be motivated by the gain than by the cost.

There are many more of these social science hacks for presenters, but these is the essential list of must-haves to make you effective. You should include all of these in your next presentation to be even more successful.