Imagine rushing to hug a familiar colleague at an industry event and excitedly starting to talk about last week’s insights… Until the confused look on the other person’s face reveals that they don’t have the faintest idea who you are.

You, on the other hand, feel like you know them quite well, because you’ve listened to their podcasts and read their LinkedIn updates in the evening twilight.

Many people casually greet someone on the street who doesn’t greet them back, because they are simply an actor from a TV show – not an old classmate or colleague.

In these situations, it’s not about poor memory or social awkwardness, but about a phenomenon called a parasocial relationship.

It means a one-sided, but psychologically real experience of a relationship between two people. You feel like you know someone, even though they don’t know you. The phenomenon emerges when you are repeatedly exposed to the same person’s face, voice, and thoughts. Over time, the brain starts to interpret familiarity as safety (and yes, there’s a fancy name for this too: the mere exposure effect).

And although social media makes the phenomenon visible and everyday, it’s nothing new: sociologists Horton and Wohl wrote about it already in the 1950s in the context of TV hosts and their audiences, and the phenomenon is widely studied in psychology.

This is extremely interesting from a sales and marketing perspective.

With parasocial relationships, trust doesn’t have to be built in the first meeting. It can already exist well before that. In such a situation, the impact on sales is, of course, very positive – assuming that the image you present of yourself online is real (and if it’s not, the effect is obviously and certainly the opposite).

Alongside parasocial relationships runs the theory of social presence, which defines a medium’s ability to convey the feeling of another person’s presence. Text-based communication (such as blogs or whitepapers) is “lean” in terms of social presence, while video and audio are “rich” – especially when they are posted to feeds by the person themselves, not a company account.

In a B2B context, “rich” media often reduces the perceived commercial intent of the message. When an expert speaks on video, the viewer experiences the situation more as a social interaction than a sales situation.

Brand memory is built on consistent repetition – and the same applies to people.

When a leader or expert shows up regularly on LinkedIn, speaks in a recognizable voice in podcasts, and shares their thinking openly on Instagram, they begin to feel familiar over time. Authenticity and the right level of self-expression strengthen this effect: talking about oneself increases perceived authenticity and acceptance of the message through parasocial interaction.

Big decisions, such as B2B purchases, always involve personal risk, and a wrong choice can cost money, time, credibility, or in the worst case even your job – everyone remembers what they say about buying IBM. That’s why buyers look not only for rational reasons, but also for safety: they want to choose a solution (and the person behind it) that feels predictable and trustworthy.

High social presence correlates positively with purchase intent, because it reduces skepticism and activates social engagement scripts in the brain.

A parasocial relationship reduces friction throughout the sales process

The visibility of leaders and experts on social media is not personal branding for the sake of personal branding, or because it’s nice to get attention and be called a thought leader. It is, to a very large extent, a business-critical part of operations.

A Finn, of course, would traditionally respond that a good product sells itself, and shouting on social media has nothing to do with it. I would like to think that we’re not quite that naive anymore, even here in Finland.

(Yes, I know many still are.)

A good product is, of course, a necessary starting point – but even a good product without awareness always has to explain itself first. That is a much heavier starting position than one where the other party already somewhat knows what it’s about.

A parasocial relationship doesn’t replace marketing or do the sales work for anyone, but it does the same thing a good brand does: it makes sales easier.

And sometimes it leads to someone hugging you at the first meeting.

That can be quite nice too.

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