As we see more candid content on our timelines, is it time you start reaping the benefits of making your audiences laugh?

Unsurprisingly, more than half of us want to see marketing content that makes us laugh. Who doesn’t love a good chuckle? It brightens our days, adds variety to our feeds and allows brands the option to drop the veil and humanise their content.

Now, most brands aren’t strangers to having a joke with their audience. Every year, thousands of marketing teams embrace their funny bone for April Fool’s Day. It’s a great reminder that a social media content strategy isn’t always just about the metrics. It’s also about making those all-important connections with your consumers – so why limit this to one single day in the spring?

In this article, we will take a look at some of the who, what, why and how’s of using humour on social media to help you decide if it could be right for you.

Why does humour work well on social?

Relatability and memorability

Relatability means greater impact. Using this idea to joke about shared or common experiences makes consumers feel connected to each other and, more importantly, your brand. This can include offering your product as a solution to a common problem or simply using shared experience to allow your audience to bond with the real people who are at the heart of your business.

Additionally, this makes your brand memorable. We all remember the things that make us laugh, like a funny story among friends or your favourite quote from The Office, the memory of comedy can be timeless. Linking a lasting impression from your content to positive emotions like laughter is sure to promote customer engagement long after the content was first shared.

Sharing is caring

If you are considering implementing some jesting into your marketing, it doesn’t need to be limited to social. However, offering likes, comments, retweets, and shares to push your content onward, social media platforms offer a goldmine of impressions.

Here the above relatability factor comes into play. Land a joke successfully and followers will hit those important share buttons. Soon your content can be pushed to a further audience with no further direct effort on your part.

Why people use social media

But why are we even on social media? What keeps us scrolling? A 2021 study into our motives found that our search to find funny or entertaining content is second only to our need to stay up to date with current events/news.

If you still aren’t convinced, the study reports that researching products to buy is much less important to our social media driving factors. This means, that by creating humour focused content, a brand is much more likely to catch the eye of their consumer and you’ll find your content is perhaps, just what they were scrolling for!

Introducing humour

Who does it well?

Every brand is different, and so is its audience. This means your approach to comedy needs to be tailored to your audience just as much as it is to your goals. With a variety of humour types at your disposal, here are some brands we think have hit the nail on the head.

1. RyanAir

The budget airline is a prime example of how utilising comedy within your content can drive metric growth. Ryanair’s approach is simple yet effective and has enabled the brand to accumulate more than 1.6 million followers on its official TikTok account as of March 2022.

Their consistent and reliable approach uses repurposed and original meme content, trending sounds, and adding personality to images of their planes using the superimposed face filter.

Throughout this, the brand shows awareness but also acceptance of the status, stereotypes and public opinion of the brand to use to their advantage within their jokes. All the while, they ensure an underlying tone of the core selling point, affordable flights across Europe, without being too forceful in pushing their services.

2. Innocent  

Probably one of the more well-known brands for comedy content. Innocent’s social media presence is light, funny, and entertaining, across every social platform in a variety of formats. The team lead with their personality rather than product, making brilliant use of trends and often poking fun at their management.

An excellent example of this can be seen on April Fool’s Day 2022. Whilst maintaining the Innocent tone of voice, the brand uses team-centric comedy to promote their work-life in a positive light. Although the content does highlight an error made by the team, the humour involved is light-hearted and of a supportive nature, which in turn promotes that aforementioned relatability for the brand.

Although the post does feature imagery of the product, there is no direct mention or sales angle to the content itself. Choices such as this serve to keep their brand name on users’ feeds with regular content while allowing for variety.

3. Netflix

The Netflix team is hot on their trending memes and are experts in making their thousands of entertaining shows and films fit. Not only are memes easy and quick to create, but Netflix uses already existing meme templates or language to lock into an existing trend and consistently appear as a brand that is listening, relevant, quick-witted and offering something refreshing as a brand.

But why does the use of memes work so well for promoting their service? It’s simple. By using imagery and always relating the content of the meme to the latest trending show on the platform, the meme works on three levels. The first is the overall relatability of the meme’s focus, the second provides an ‘inside joke’ feel to those who have already viewed the show. The third is aimed at those who are yet to join the platform or watch such shows or films, who feel a sense of invitation to sign up and watch to be let in on the joke at hand.

With memes being shared frequently on social media, including pages solely dedicated to this crowd-favourite content type, there’s a whole world of content for you to choose and mould to your needs.

What are the risks?

Consuming comedic content can be easier than creating it. As with everything we see online, it also involves an element of risk. Humour, as with all things is subject to preference and your joke may not always land. On a public social media page, this can do a lot more damage than just a bad dad joke said around the Christmas table.

Herein lies the risk, and perhaps a community management apocalypse. Telling the wrong joke or one that falls flat could convince followers that your brand is not nearly as relevant or relatable as you were working to be, or worse. Even without the intention to cause upset and create that negative social sentiment, some topics can cause serious offence and may make your brand can seem ignorant or even cruel.

Unfortunately, the wide variety of choices available for comedy content makes it difficult to determine what will and won’t be a success, and what works for one brand may not work for another. If you are yet to identify your target audience, what they want and how they respond to this type of content, it may be best to give humour the back seat for now.

Key takeaways:

• Humour in social media is not for everyone so think carefully about if this is right for your brand before you change your strategy.
• Think outside your product. Content, especially of this nature, need not solely focus on the ‘hard sell’. Use this opportunity to really show the audience who you are and what your brand is about.
• Never push past what is appropriate. If a topic feels like a risk, it most likely will be and therefore will likely cause more harm than good.  
• Make the most of trends – let your audience tell you what they will like. Memes, emojis, gifs, sounds and more are all easily adaptable to your brand, whilst ensuring your content is relevant and set up for success.

Most importantly, have fun! Content creation and experimenting with new ideas should be exciting, especially when some good humour is involved.

The post Creating likes from laughs—including humour in your social media strategy appeared first on MintTwist.

Yet, shockingly, some companies still see it as a job to pass off – and leave full control – to someone with no marketing experience! Throughout this article, we’ll discuss what opportunities you could be missing out on with this approach and why working with a social media agency could help you level up your social presence, no matter the size of your business.

A team of talented individuals

Social media management takes an abundance of skills to do properly. Large scale teams may include a variety of:

• Copywriters
• Graphic designers
• Photographers
• Videographers
• Content creators
• Social strategists
• Data analysts
• Community managers
• Brand managers
• Influencer managers
• Paid social specialists 
• Social commerce experts
• Along with social media & marketing managers

That’s a lot of roles to put on an intern!

Investing in a social media agency over an individual better allocates your cash by incorporating multiple talents at the right level, instead of relying on just 1 person to have ALL the skills mentioned above. Agencies will work closely with your team to understand your brand, your goals, and your desires on social. From here, they’ll build a bespoke plan to make sure you’re getting exactly what you need from them to reach your goals. And if this needs to shift month-to-month, it can! Minimise the risk from an exceptionally fast-changing industry.

What’s more, the team are used to working seamlessly together. Looping all efforts in a streamlined process with you in the centre.

Save time

Whether you’re passing social management to an intern or struggling to keep your posting frequency consistent, one of the most common issues for small to medium businesses is that you and your team simply don’t have the time to manage it. 

Working with a social media agency can be far more cost-effective than hiring a full-time resource and you can rest in the knowledge that they know what they’re doing with years of experience across multiple clients, industries, and social platforms. It’s what they do day in and day out. Now utilising their skills for you too so you can focus your time elsewhere.

Stay up to date on social trends and changes

The social realm changes on a daily basis. Are you keeping up? 

In addition to trending content itself changing by the hour, in terms of stories, sounds, and challenges, social platforms are making changes to their feeds, content options, and algorithms constantly.

If you don’t already know about the infamous NFTs now making their way onto Instagram, sharing your services and creating proposals directly through LinkedIn, and the details of the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter, the chances are that you’re already missing opportunities.

By working with a social media agency, you have a team of social experts at your fingertips who are reading through hundreds of updates every single month. They do the leg work and update you on the ones that will matter for you and your business, offering recommendations of how best to implement them to your strategy. And then, they’ll do it for you! 

Many heads are better than one

Most will know that to do well in social media, you need some great creativity. Many heads are better than one not only for their specific skills base, but their ideas too.

At MintTwist, benefit from creative brainstorms with the wider team to craft hilarious, innovative, engaging content, campaign, and partnership opportunities.

Access to leading social tools

There are countless tools out there which can aid your social game. But, they come at a cost. 

What may not be feasible for you to invest in independently can become available through an agency. Below is a list of the types of tools and use cases you could benefit from.

Social scheduling tools 

Save time by scheduling your content in bulk with recommended optimal post times, giving your content the best chances of reaching more users and pushing your engagement levels up.

What’s more, MintTwist’s tools allow strict workflow approvals meaning nothing will get published without your final go ahead. Eradicate the risk of mistakes.

Performance analytics

If you’re on social, you probably look at your analytics pages at least from time to time. Social tools allow you to look at everything from one place, so no more hopping between apps on your phone or desktop.

Plus, custom reporting allows you to view data on a much more granular level. Have complete transparency on the formats, topics, imagery and more which are performing best per channel to influence your future content planning.

Central community management feed

Today, 64% of people would rather message than call a business. So, an effective community management system is essential. Pull together your DMs, comments, ad comments, reshares, and mentions from every platform into one inbox stream for a streamlined response system.  Even connect your Shopify account to pull up order details for users messaging for updates!

Social listening 

Social media isn’t just about talking, it’s about listening too.

Tap into what your customers and target audience are talking about. What do they care about? What do they engage with? How can you solve a problem they’re having or relate to something they feel passionately about to form a stronger connection?

Social listening allows you to tap into relevant conversations and discover these insights. Take a birds-eye view of the industry or narrow it down to answer a very specific hypothesis. Such as in the example above, what hot chocolate flavour combinations are the most discussed and prefered?

However, we’re all aware that data is a highly valuable commodity. And that’s no different when it comes to social data. Leading social listening tools can be a significant investment for businesses and even then you’ll need a skilled data analyst to make sufficient use of the tool. From writing boolean queries, knowing the limitations of each channel you’re researching, optimising your data, and designing bespoke dashboards, such tools offer huge capacity and opportunity, but only if you know how to use them.

Social media agencies use such tools at scale, meaning you can benefit from their economies of scale and have a social listening expert or experts working on your account. Who wouldn’t want to pay less for the same result, right?

Audience insights

Furthermore, social listening can additionally uncover deep insights into your audience segments. Grasp a solid understanding of their personality traits, online usage, buying mindset and much more, to influence not only your social strategy but your entire business strategy too. 

Competitor analysis

Lastly, stay on top of your competitor’s efforts. See what’s working for them vs what’s working for you. Perhaps there are certain learnings you can take to test and input into your own strategy? Or, you may merely want to benchmark against the industry to have a better understanding of your own metrics.

How does social media link to your wider business efforts?

Finally, your social media managers should not be considered completely separate from all other teams. There are many ways to incorporate them to ultimately lead you to greater efficiency, improved outputs, and reach your wider business goals.

Utilise content across your marketing teams

Be it a blog, webinar, or social post, content creation takes time. Your social team create vast quantities of content every month. Why not take some of their ideas or adapt creatives to fit other channels?

Throughout the planning stages of the monthly content calendar, MintTwist highlights areas which could work well in other formats. Working in a digital agency means in addition to being social experts we also have solid skills and experience across other digital services and how they can flow together for an integrated marketing approach.

Amplify your business efforts with social

Have hard-working PR teams? Connect them with your social team.

PR teams have the stories and messaging and your social team can help adjust and amplify it across your owned profiles in the most strategic approach.

Our social team are used to working seamlessly with clients’ PR teams, be it internal or external, as well as other design, customer service and other teams.

Utilise social insights across teams

Lastly, the data your social team is using can be shared to provide almost all of your team better insight into your business and your audience. Consistently improve your strategies across the board through greater collaboration.

Conclusion

To summarise, managing a business’s social media presence strategically and creatively requires a vast amount of skill and resources. Working with a social media agency can aid your business in a multitude of ways, but we see the greatest benefits as:

Small businesses: Save time and never miss a post again. Our social experts can take care of everything, leaving you and your team free to get on with your main responsibilities.

Medium businesses: Benefit from multiple talents at the right quantity for you. Mitigate the risk of investing heavily in one area and missing opportunities elsewhere with a flexible plan to make use of designers/data analysis/strategists etc. when and how you need them. Level up your content with deeper data and analysis through our scheduling and analytics tools to see what’s really working for you.

Large businesses: Take advantage of economies of scale and access to leading social and research tools to take not only your social game further, but benefit all other teams in your business too. And, be blown away by creative content, campaigns, and partnerships concepts from a full team of creatives and marketing strategists.

Have we convinced you? Get in touch to see how our social media management and PPC team could help you.

The post Why work with a social media agency? appeared first on MintTwist.