THE HUMOUR ADVANTAGE THAT BRANDS NEED

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Social media has taken people of all generations by storm. They consume content of each and every kind. But, as brands, it is very important to identify the type of content which finds appeal with the audience.

Posting the regular branded content won’t generate many impressions. In fact, a Moz study states that the content which works wonders for brands is the one that is humorous in nature. And what’s better than having a humorous take on topical content.

For instance, take your social media feed. You’d definitely like your feed to be entertaining which can brighten up your face instantly, if nothing else. So as a brand, your content also needs to have some sort of entertainment value.

Moreover, when your content is laden with humour, it makes your brand more human. When humour is relevant to the current trending topics, live events or dayto-day life, audiences can easily relate to it. This content can be in the form of GIFs, short video clips or even memes. Thus, as a brand, with humour in your content, you can now not just talk with your audiences, but also share experiences with them.

We all know about the flurry of memes on Radhika Apte and Netflix and how people poked fun at them. However, what nobody noticed was Netflix’s social media savageness when they came up with a 2-minute spoof video titled ‘Omnipresent’. The title itself led many brands to follow up with humorous posts and memes, leave aside the original spoof video which went viral in no time.

Brands in this case played smart by having their followers visually associate with their respective brands through humorous posts. They talked about their respective products in these posts while taking a dig at Netflix and Apte. This, in fact, is a clever way of marketing products. Keep a pulse on what’s trending and try giving a fun twist to it.

When a brand gives their audience a slight tickle to their funny bone, there is a much higher chance of that post/content being shared and posted to their own network; expanding a brand’s social media reach. We at Brand Factory too, lapped up ‘Omnipresent’ and created a content peg in the form of a meme. The meme immediately garnered millions of impressions on social media and helped boost our brand positioning among our followers.

During the Asia cup, where India was taking on Pakistan, we came up with a quirky meme which put the brand communication into the limelight. The meme was based on the trending topic and it took just a few minutes to capture people’s attention.

This shows that humorous content is indeed being shared extensively on social media and spreads quickly. The reason being, humour brings people together. It is infectious. It is social. People like to smile and laugh. So once you get your social media followers laughing, you’ll slowly build a sense of community and connections with your brand and amongst your followers.
The key to build humorous content is having a brand and audience connect. This connect is built by having communication which resonates with the audience. The best example here is Amul. For decades, it has been crafting quirky content and charming us all.

However, being humorous is not always easy. No brand wants to offend their audience. So a boundary has to be drawn on what classifies as humorous and what does not, based on your audience.

Having said that, being quirky has farreaching effects on brands and when done wisely can generate a lot of attention on social media. In a nutshell, brands which choose to stay quirky on social media and communicate it with a fantastic sense of humour have an upper hand in the social media space.