Facebook Marketing Using Humor with Brian Carter
Facebook Marketing Using Humor
On May 8th, I had the great and fun pleasure of chatting with author, Brian Carter. He and I were on a panel together talking about humor – a topic near and dear to both of us. Humor and depth create meaning and engagement in social media in general. In this podcast, we specifically focus on Facebook marketing using humor. So what works? What doesn’t? What strategies do companies need to employ and, at the tactical level, what should companies be doing when it comes to Facebook marketing using humor? Of course, Brian and I both discuss as we have in the past – why companies are so risk-averse.
And, yes, cat memes are still funny. Check out business cats!
Examples and Strategies of Facebook Marketing Using Humor
Here are some of the tips we discussed. Want more? You have to listen to the podcast!
1. Know your goals and audience. You should be tracking what they like, comment on, and share over time. Ask yourself, “what are the commonalities across my most heavily shared/liked/commented on content? Create more of that.
2. Get visual. You have to go visual today or go home! Pics of memes (business cat is an example), and funny pics that are innocuous are great. If that doesn’t work, try bacon! Ha!
3. Add quotes. You can marry great quotes – funny or inspirational – to the images for a one-two punch and that works well.
4. Experiment. I still believe in this as I mentioned and companies shouldn’t fear taking small risks. There is some risk in humor and as I explain on the podcast, comedy is different from humor. A touch of levity can be low-risk and do wonders for your brand. I gave the example of Intel. Don’t aim for comedy per se; aim for making people smile. Brian had a great point that is true in my experience as well. There are always be nay-sayers who will always find a reason not to try something. So boot the naysayers out of your content meetings. You need the devil’s advocate there; you don’t need the one person that finds problems with everything. What ends up happening often is that decisions will defer to the lowest common denominator – in this case, deferring to one objection, not matter how small it might be.
5. The truth is funny. Recognizing a universal truth that your audience understands signals to your audience that you get them. I’ve talked about this before. Brian gave an example of a recruiting company using an image with a person lamenting on Monday that there were only five more days until the weekend. It’s a truth your audience gets. Hey, people are human!
6. Engage with polls and madlib-style fill in the blanks. I mentioned Brian did this with his post, “You are what you eat. So today you are a……………….”
7. Connect your people to your audience. People may not want to see your team bowling pic on Facebook; however, if your team celebrated a milestone (it’s 100,000th customer) or launched a new product to help more customers, then combine that customer-focused message with your internal fun pics so images don’t look random and irrelevant to your audience. “Hey, customers…you bowl us over!” OK, some puns are just for me.
The main issue here is that it’s what your audience wants to see that matters. Experiment and monitor. Create more of the good stuff that works.
Happy marketing. And, by the way, this applies to other channels as well. Create more of what works. Know your audience and look at the numbers.
Listen to the podcast.
here
How do you add humor and depth to your Facebook marketing? What has worked best for you? Leave a comment below!
