Biometric Marketing and Social Media

Updated January 12, 2023

Reading Time: 2 minutes

How Engaged are People?

A recent study of content marketing showed that on social media around 5% of content attracts 90% of total digital engagement, so clearly we’re getting this wrong 95% of the time, with this statistic making the Pareto principle look efficient in comparison. This level of inefficiency isn’t sustainable for the social media networks. Eventually, users will get tired of scrolling through their endless Facebook feeds to find something interesting. So could this ‘throw it out and see what sticks’ method be refined with biometric marketing?

The big companies in the sector (Facebook, Google and Apple) are looking at biometrics to try and solve this problem. In this context, biometric marketing is simply tracking the bodies movements to try and determine how engaged a person is. For example tracking eye movements or heart rate. Whereas neuroscience is tracking how your brain function or brain activity changes while doing something.

Taking Your Customer’s Pulse

Obviously research like this can’t be undertaken by every marketer, but hopefully, the effort put in by the tech giants will filter downwards. Initial reports show that Google will focus on facial recognition; trying to read our expressions to judge how we are interacting with the content we’re digesting. This sounds as terrifying as it does interesting, but if you put aside the question of whether people will want to share this information with marketers, the potential for getting detailed feedback is huge.

Another area where biometric information can be collected and fed back into marketing is activity trackers. Tools like the Fitbit or Apple Watch help track your daily activity in all sorts of different ways.
Imagine how useful it would be as an advertiser to track the heart rate of someone watching one of your ads. Or knowing that on days when they see your ads (say for sporting activities) their daily steps increased by 10%. Obviously, data like this at a micro level will be impossible to draw conclusions from, but if this kind of technology becomes commonplace the applications could be almost endless. For example apps like MyFitnessPal could, when you are on a low-calorie diet, coordinate with your fitness tracking application and then feed that information to advertisers so they can only show you health options for food or activities.

Biometric Marketing – The Future?

Embracing the information that biometric marketing could provide should improve content engagement and ultimately lead to better marketing and advertising. It would give each person a customized experience which, in theory, should lead to a happy customer. However, this information will come at a cost to the user. The amount of personal information that is collected about our lives online is already staggering and many will feel that biometric marketing is a step too far, collecting data about things that are too personal. The idea of Google watching your face 24/7 just to see how you react to a YouTube ad probably doesn’t appeal to anyone…