3 Ways Social Media Can Motivate People to Conserve Energy

With average temperatures soaring worldwide, air conditioner use is on the rise. Unfortunately, costs rise along with it. If that's not enough to motivate you to cut energy, what could? How about social media? Here are just a few ways social media can motivate people to conserve energy. It: 

Enables the Education Others

According to a recent poll, most users don't know where to start when it comes to reducing their energy usage. IBN polled 10,000 customers last year, and of those 10,000 customers, more than 30 percent of the customers had never heard of the term "dollar per kwh," and more than 60 percent didn't have any knowledge of the terms "smart grids" or "smart meters." Social media can be used to educate consumers. Once the information is in their face, they'll understand.

Outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are perfect for sharing tips like these. Presenting the tips on these social sites gives the user a chance to navigate through the tips the way they want and presents the opportunity to further educate themselves on tips that they want to learn more about.

You can also share solutions that people can do around the house to reduce energy, like making sure all of the vents in your house are open. Another solution would be advising followers to cut back on using the air conditioner as much and use fans to cool off. You could also suggest that your followers dry their clothes on a clothesline instead of using a dryer. Sure, it'll take longer, but at least they'll be saving energy!

Lends Itself to Gamification

Everyone loves competition. If you take each individual's energy use and put it on an app or on Facebook, you can compare them to each other and compete to see who can cut back the most. You can also load up nearby different neighborhoods and compare their energy usage with yours. Of course, you can use the ultimate motivation — offer a prize to the person who can cut back the most.

Opower, the brainchild of Alliance Associate Opower and Board member NRDC, is a program that utilizes Facebook to allow you to compete with your friends and see who's saving the most energy. It uses information from your energy bill to display how your home ranks among similar homes in the nation and among the homes of your Facebook friends.

The app is supported by multiple electricity providers, and it automatically pulls your energy use data each month to compare it with other people. Otherwise, you'll have to enter your energy data manually each month using your energy bill.

The ultimate goal of the program is to make saving energy a social activity and to create a conversation about the merits of energy efficiency. By adding a social aspect to energy saving, the intent is motivate more people to save energy.

Some electric companies are taking this info from social platforms and rewarding their customers for using less energy. Using a combination of Facebook and data they already have, they're determining which customers are using a lot of electricity. From there, they may send a notice and inform the customer that they're using a lot of energy and offer some helpful hints on how to reduce energy use. They may also include a coupon for some detergent.

It may seem counterproductive for an energy company to discourage the use of energy, but the big companies are facing government mandates to encourage energy conservation. Also, the big companies are have to deal with the rising cost of energy and the difficulty of building power plants and more distribution systems.

Allows You to Target Your Message

Different age groups are motivated by different things. One study showed that those under the age of 25 are shocked and motivated by the environment, and they're up to two and a half times more likely than those over the age of 55 to follow the lead of people in their networks. With big data, you can ramp up the impact of your message by personalizing the tips on a massive scale. In doing so, you can pinpoint big influencers on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.

It can be extremely easy to motivate others to save energy, it just takes proper planning and some motivation. Perhaps your followers will find the motivation in having a lighter bill, or maybe their sense of satisfaction will come when they're bragging to friends that they've beaten for the month and have saved more energy than they have. Regardless of where the motivation comes from, saving energy benefits everyone involved! What are some other ways that you use to influence your followers to reduce energy around the house?