There are fundamental drivers of every human action. Many people are aware of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but there are other theories about our innate motivations as well, such as William Glasser’s ‘Choice Theory’. I’d venture a bet that 95% of readers have encountered one of these lists at least once in their lives. Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, in almost all lists of the basic human needs there is a need called “Love/Belonging”, the need that is fulfilled by acceptance of family, friends, and society at large.

This need to be accepted and respected by others is powerful and universal. We all feel it, and now social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare have thrown us all quite a curve ball in terms of what must occur for us to feel fulfilled in this area. As a result, what was once a genuine effort to fulfill our need for love/belonging has mutated into the most widespread and deep-seated epidemic of narcissism the world has ever seen.

Last Friday I had the privilege of presenting at The Ad Club’s inaugural “Under the Dome” event. And we all know there’s nothing people would rather do at 9am on Friday than talk about the behavioral patterns and neuroscience behind Pandemic Labs’ strategy for Facebook Engagement. Especially when it means they have to throw their whole playbook out the window!

The presentation was a component of our ongoing Science of Social series. (We put out a great infographic a couple weeks ago, in case you missed it). Some people think we’re exaggerating the “science” part of our new series, but as anyone who attended on Friday will tell you, there’s more science here than you can shake a stick at.

Yes, that title required three exclamation points.

Here at Pandemic Labs, we’ve been working in social media for a long time. And over the years, we’ve developed some great tools that have allowed us to gain insight into the depths of social media usage. Most recently, we’ve developed a tool called Watchtower that allows us to gain tremendous insight into Facebook Pages.

We want to share as much of our knowledge as possible, because the better marketers are at social media, the happy we will all be as users. To that end, you are going to see a lot more information from us in our new series “The Science of Social.”

To kick things off, we’ve created this infographic which shows some key insight into what Facebook users engage with the most versus what brand Pages post the most.

Check it out:

Mediocrity should be a hard pill for your brand to swallow. You should not be OK with doing a job that can be considered “good enough”. This isn’t a rally-time bar hookup, and just doing a thing isn’t the same as mastering its craft. Are we all guilty of falling prey to this sort of cantankerous folly? Hells yeah. Do we know better? For sure. Does realizing either of those things make us in any way, shape or form immune? Nope. But when it comes to a well-designed, and well-executed social media strategy for your brand, simply put: mediocre won’t cut it.

We work with a lot of Facebook Pages and we study even more of them. It’s amazing what sort of patterns become clear when you study tens of thousands of posts from hundreds of Pages. One pattern that has struck me is the “East Coast Mindset” displayed by so many major Facebook Pages.

Nowadays, most people are pretty clear that using third-party software to schedule your Facebook posts is a terrible idea (though that may be changing). But that leaves many companies with the problem that their social media manager only works so many hours per day. These hours are almost always reflected in the post times of that Page, and very often bear no regard for the makeup and location of that Fan base.

We’ve studied a number of Pages lately and more interesting than the times when most people do post is the one time when almost no one does: 10PM Eastern.