Why Paying for Social Is Better Than ‘Doing’ Social

For businesses, social media is like meth. I say this based on encyclopedic knowledge of drugs obtained via Breaking Bad marathons. Meth’s great for a while, but over time it’s harder to get the results you once got. At some point, you’re spending all your time and money thinking about it. And by the time you start worrying about your teeth falling out, it’s too late.

Recent research confirms this:

“The average organic reach for posts from Facebook pages in March was 2.6 percent of a brand’s audience. … This percentage dropped to 2.3 percent for pages with more than 1 million likes.” (Source: Localytics, reported by 1to1Media)

(Source: Science!)

Other social networks are showing signs of decreased reach as well, albeit less rapidly than Facebook. There are two widely cited reasons for it: 1) Social media sites want to encourage businesses to pay them money for the value they now get for free; and 2) As more people and businesses post to social media more often, everyone gets less attention, so supply and demand push reach down and rates up.

This was inevitable. Because social media provides a direct line to consumers, we’ve bestowed it an enormous amount of perceived value for business. But as the industry matures, our buck’s bang will slip to an inevitable equilibrium—like it has with Google AdWords and other saturated marketing channels. In a nutshell, social is becoming less easy to exploit. We were on a high; now we’re on a comedown.

For a long time, the echo chamber preached that the best way to reach people is to create ongoing content on social (either promoting more substantial content from an owned property or creating so-called “snackable” social-native content), and that by doing so we’ll rack up loyal audiences who we can repeatedly reach whenever we want. Recently, it’s become clear to me that that’s no longer entirely the case.

In fact, it may be cheaper and more effective to pay for social media promotion than to rack up big follower counts and constantly feed them.

A thought experiment

What follows is essentially a Fermi estimation, a napkin calculation meant to find a ballpark answer to the question What is the value of organic social media for business?

Say you’re a business that has 100,000 followers on Facebook. Your average post will be seen—just glanced at, not clicked on—by 2,600 people, according to Forrester. (Though its data shows the average by now may be lower, between 0.7 and 2 percent, we’ll go with 2.6 for optimism’s sake). Studies on Facebook click-through rates vary, but for this thought experiment, let’s go with thehighest stat I’ve seen (5 percent of impressions). At that rate, something like 130 people will click through to whatever it is you’re sharing.

Twitter impression and engagement rates vary across the board, but the service doesn’t (yet) discriminate between brands’ content and individuals’ content. On average, I’ve found that my own tweets reach about 5 percent of my total followers on an average day and a 0.125 percent click through rate, in which I send five tweets. For a 15-tweet day (the max I’ve seen recommended before returns start really diminishing), with 100,000 followers, I’d get about 125 click-throughs a day. About the same as Facebook. (We could double that and assume that a brand will be better at optimizing for click-throughs, like Contently’s Twitter account does versus my personal, but as you’ll see below, even twice the effectiveness won’t change the end conclusion.)

LinkedIn is probably the best-performing social network for our own content (mine personally and Contently itself). It has some rather crazy stats, via Buffer: 20 percent of your followers see your average post. (We actually get higher than that!) I couldn’t find average click-through rates on LinkedIn, so for Fermi estimate’s sake, let’s say that it gets as many total click-throughs as Facebook. That means a post to 100,000 followers would yield 20,000 impressions and 130 clicks to your website.

Contrast this with email, which boasts industry averages of around 20 percent open rate, and 3 percent click-through after the open. If you have 100,000 email subscribers, 20,000 of them will read the email itself (which may or may not have content in it), and 3,000 of them will click through to your website. These rates go way up with better content and headlines. (Our emails average a 4.8 percent click rate.)

Social media service Buffer recommends that businesses post 1x a day to Facebook and LinkedIn, and 14x a day to Twitter. Data shows that posting more often than once per day on Facebook yields heavily decreasing click through rates (for businesses). And more than one email per day is grounds for immediate unsubscribe, but otherwise 7x a week is not too much for good emails. We’ll go with once per weekday to give our hypothetical marketing person the weekend off.

So, over the course of a month, here’s what the optimal cadence of content sharing would get a company:

• Facebook posts to 100,000 fans, 5x per week: 52,000 impressions, 2,600 clicks per month
• Twitter posts to 100,000 followers, 98x per week: 60,000 impressions, 2,500 clicks per month
• LinkedIn posts to 100,000 followers, 10x per week: 400,000 impressions, 2,600 clicks per month
• Emails to 100,000 subscribers, 5x per week: 400,000 reads, 120,000 clicks per month

On their face, these stats make a clear case for prioritizing email as an audience engagement channel—especially since the reach on social networks will continue to decline. Emailers are in far less danger of a catastrophic algorithm change than Facebook marketers. Furthermore, an email impression (someone clicking to read) is a much better impression than a Facebook impression (someone seeing something scroll through the News Feed).

But what’s really interesting is what happens when you pit organic social media against paid social media. We wrote about the pros and cons of the leading paid link-distribution services a few weeks ago. Here’s a cost summary at last brush:

• Facebook sponsored posts: $0.50–$0.60 average cost per click
• Twitter promoted posts: $0.50–$0.55 average cost per click
• LinkedIn sponsored updates: $4 average cost per click
• Sponsored emails: vary widely, but costs tend to start around $100 CPM, which means if we expected the same rates as organic email, we’d be getting about $3.33 per click
• And for context: Outbrain promoted headlines (send traffic straight to posts on your website rather than via a social network): $0.25–$0.35 average cost per click

(These clicks vary in cost because of targeting and quality. E.g., LinkedIn costs 8x as much, but the traffic tends to be extremely high quality versus the others.)

(Also, this is the part where I must disclose that our company has and will likely continue to do business with all four of the companies I’ve mentioned: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Outbrain. That doesn’t change the way I personally write about them, but you as a reader should know.)

At average rates, the value of the organic clicks you might get from one month on each of these channels would be approximately the following:

• One month of organic Facebook clicks: $1,430
• One month of organic Twitter clicks: $1,313
• One month of organic LinkedIn clicks: $10,400
• One month of organic email clicks: $400,000

A good social media agency will typically charge (in my experience) $10,000–$25,000 a month. A dedicated social media manager in-house might cost $4,000–$10,000 a month. This does not include the cost of acquiring the 100,000 subscribers for these networks, which is often done inefficiently. If we said it cost $1 to acquire a social follower, it would take almost 6 years for organic Facebook clicks to pay off the cost of acquiring your followers, versus just buying the clicks through paid updates.

It could take almost 6 years for organic social media clicks to pay off the cost of acquiring your followers.

Let’s ignore the fact that six years from now social media will be entirely different, and let’s pretend we got all these followers for free. LinkedIn excluded, if, say, it costs a company $10,000 a month to maintain its social media accounts, the company would need half a million followers on each network to justify its own social media maintenance cost.

Otherwise, it’s better off just paying for each click.

With 100,000 fans, you can get 250,000 Facebook clicks a year. With 100,000dollars, you can get nearly that many clicks in a day. And if you’re paying to promote only your best content, you can cut your cost per click in half; our own Facebook promotions average $0.20–0.25 per click, or around the cost of Outbrain.

The place where paid social really pays off versus organic is when you look beyond the simple click. Here’s what I mean:

The average post on this site gets about 3 minutes of attention time per person. 250,000 social media clicks to our content year round will net us 12,500 hours of attention.

The top 10 percent of our stories garner over 5 minutes of attention time per reader. The same number of social media clicks to just our best pieces would net us an additional 8,000+ hours of attention, nearly doubling each click’s value. Each of those readers will be much more likely to 1) subscribe to our newsletter and come back, 2) share our content with others, further decreasing our cost per click, and 3) become customers and advocates for our brand.

With every optimization like this, paid social becomes a better and better financial deal over spending money to manage organic social—or at the very least to create an ongoing stream of unique content for it. Of course, you’ll need someone to run those paid social campaigns, and you need good content to promote in the first place. And you need that content to change if you want to continue to build relationships with people.

The smartest strategy, we’ve found, is when you combine paid social with email, parlaying paid social clicks into subscribers of the highest-impact organic channel out there:

About 5 percent of new visitors subscribe to our email when prompted, so if we spend $100 on Facebook or Outbrain at $0.20 a click, we get 500 readers and 25 new email subscribers. In the course of a year, those subscribers pay themselves off eight times over.

What these calculations tell us

For businesses that want social media clicks: At current rates, a brand that has fewer than 1 million followers on Facebook or Twitter is better off paying to promote its best content via sponsored updates than it is paying someone to post social content all day long. And it probably won’t pay off the cost of acquiring followers it already sunk, versus paying just for clicks. As organic reach continues to decline, it will soon be unprofitable for brands with more than a million followers to feed their followings.

Nate Elliott, principal analyst at Forrester, writes:

“It’s clear that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer the relationships that marketing leaders crave … Yet most brands still use these sites as the centerpiece of their social efforts—thereby wasting significant financial, technological, and human resources.”

Whereas we can (and ought to) conclude from this that brands should spend less time churning out social media content for the Internet to devour and more time creating thoughtful, higher-quality content and putting paid social and email marketing behind it, there’s one thing we ought not to overlook: A ton of people still arrive at a company’s website via social media. Specifically, traffic comes from content that regular people—not the company itself—share with their friends.

There are two ways that businesses ought to take advantage of this. First, provide easy ways to share your content. Make those “Tweet this” buttons prominent and easy to find. Second, prioritize building your people’s social media footprints over your corporate accounts. A company with executives with great social followings will get a lot more reach than one with an equal amount of followers for its corporate accounts.

And, as the above calculations would indicate, smart companies will put paid spend behind those individuals’ most engaging posts and implement an email capture strategy.

Says Elliott, “If you have to choose between adding a subscriber to you email list or gaining a new Facebook fan, go for email every time.” (Our favorite tool on that front is SumoMe.)

Most important, we ought not to blindly keep playing the same social media game when the game owners are changing the board. In the meth business—Walter White tells me—rule #1 is to not get hooked. As Facebook and Twitter’s empires mature, dumping resources into organic social over paid is a good way for brands to lose their teeth.

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6 Ways Snapchat Plans to Revolutionize Digital Advertising

“These are the kinds of questions I hate, dude.”

That’s what Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel told Bloomberg Business when asked about his long-term vision for the company.

Spiegel, just 24, has been notoriously secretive about his plans for Snapchat, which is valued at around $15 billion. However, despite his elusive answer, Spiegel used the rare interview to reveal some of his strong opinions about digital advertising and hint at what lies ahead for his social platform. We’re only halfway through “the year of the chat app,” and Spiegel has already made some huge moves that are primed to disrupt mobile marketing.

Here are the six most important takeaways you need to know about Snapchat’s future plans.

1. Viewing advertising as a product

Successful advertising starts with the right mindset.

“A lot of people look at Internet advertising as a tax on the system,” Spiegel said. “That’s sort of discouraging if you care about making new products.”

For example, many criticize Facebook for its advertising efforts, which place strict holds on brands and have privacy issues that concern users. Perhaps that’s why Spiegel turned down a $3 billion acquisition from Facebook in 2013. Instead, he’s been getting ready to offer a young generation of mobile users a completely new experience.

“Evan views advertising as a product, while most Internet founders view advertising as a necessary evil,” Imran Khan, former investment banker and Snapchat’s new chief strategy officer, added in the Bloomberg piece. Snapchat doesn’t have an ad chief yet, but Khan is overseeing the marketing strategy while the company searches for the right candidate.

2. Saying “no” to targeted ads

Part of building a new advertising experience includes staying away from personalized programmatic ads, which can sometimes feel overbearing and/or creepy.

“It’s definitely weird when a vacuum follows you around the Internet,” Spiegel said.

According to the Bloomberg article, Spiegel is actually opposed to most kinds of online advertising, and he’s also ruling out ads that involve inserting ads into any one-to-one messaging between users because he finds it too invasive. Instead, Snapchat is set up for people to come to the content because they wantto read it—not because it’s being pushed into their feeds. For that quality control, Spiegel relies on editorial resources.

3. Building an editorial network

Snapchat has already begun playing around with editorial features by inviting users to piece together “Stories” of their media and share them with friends. Earlier this year, the company invited brands and publications to get in on the action with the new Discover channels, which provide curated news from partners like the Discovery Channel, CNN, Comedy Central, and ESPN.

Snapchat is also producing its own content on Discover. To build out its publishing arm, the network hired away Ellis Hamburger from The Verge and Peter Hamby from CNN. Given Hamby’s political background, we speculatedhe was brought on to help Snapchat become the go-to network for coverage of the 2016 presidential election. And we weren’t off the mark.

Snapchat just started posting job ads for “content analysts” to help provide “24/7 coverage” of next year’s election.

4. Focusing on mobile

One of the most unique features of Snapchat—aside from the fact that all content disappears—is that it is solely designed for mobile use.

Because of this, all content created for Snapchat from brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s are specifically formatted for vertical viewing on smartphones. With this policy in place, the user doesn’t have to interrupt the viewing experience by turning the phone sideways so the video fills the screen. It also prevents ad partners from taking ads off YouTube and Facebook to plug them right in on Snapchat. The content has to be specifically produced for the platform and the user, which will theoretically lead to a higher-quality experience.

In a sales document that Snapchat is sending to advertisers this month, the company claims its users are nine times more likely to watch an entire ad if they don’t have to rotate their phones.

5. Ditching the data

While every brand publisher is frantically searching for the right metrics to measure content effectiveness, Spiegel turns his back on big data.

“There’s a sort of weird obsession with the idea that data can solve anything,” Spiegel said. “I really haven’t seen data deliver the results that I’ve seen a great editor deliver.”

Perhaps this is why there are no options for commenting on snaps. As the Bloomberg Business article states: “While Facebook and Google focus on technologies that advance material based on what’s popular or useful, Spiegel feels he has a responsibility to show Snapchat’s impressionable young audience things that are meaningful, not just popular.”

Of course, not all of Snapchat’s prospective partners are onboard with this approach to data. If they’re dishing out a heavy chunk of change, they want to be sure they’re getting a return on it. To help assuage these concerns, Snapchat cut its rates down to $20 per 1,000 views, a fraction of its undisclosed original price.

Meanwhile, Joanna Coles, editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan, is happy with the traffic she sees coming in from the publication’s Snapchat channel, which receives about 2 million views each day. “The traffic is good, and [users] read every story,” she told Bloomberg. “It’s a finite amount of content, which is a perfect snack.”

6. Banking on music

While we weren’t originally supposed to know about this, Spiegel seems to have some big plans for the digital music scene. When Sony’s email was hacked last December, an exchange between Spiegel and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton revealed that Spiegel was looking to partner with music services Vevo and Spotify. He also discussed buying a record label and promoting artists on Snapchat. Regardless of whether those plans come to fruition, we can be quite sure that Snapchat will continue to surprise us.

“I don’t think anyone saw coming what they are building,” former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya told Bloomberg. “At worst, they are the next-generation MTV. At best, they are the next-generation Viacom.”

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How To Make Money On Your Blog With Affiliate Marketing

Do you dream of making money with your blog? You invest so much time, energy and passion into writing amazing blog posts; so wouldn’t it be great to actually earn an income from what you are already doing for free?

Affiliate marketing is one of the primary methods website and blog owners use to generate revenue. In case you are not familiar with it, here’s a brief rundown: When you sign up with an affiliate program (perhaps the most well-known program is Amazon’s), you receive special links you can cut and paste onto your blog. Every time someone clicks on one of these links and then purchases a product, you receive a commission. It is that simple!

If this sounds intriguing to you, you will definitely want to keep reading. This post will walk you through exactly how to make money on your blog with affiliate marketing.

Step 1: Find an affiliate program

Your first step will be to sign up with an affiliate program. The vast majority of affiliate programs require a simple application process to ensure they are only partnering with high-quality sites. Most won’t care if you have low levels of traffic, so long as you regularly add great content to your site.

Some of the most popular affiliate marketing programs include:

Amazon Associates: While Amazon offers some of the lowest commission rates, it is also the simplest program to use. Signing up is easy, and because they offer so many products, you are sure to find ones that appeal to your audience. Also, the more products you sell, the higher your commission rate!

CJ Affiliate: This is the program formerly known as Commission Junction. One of the most established programs out there.

ShareASale: A huge selection of merchants to choose from, in every niche you can imagine.

Clickbank: Specializes in digital products. Digital products are great as they tend to give the publisher (you) much higher commissions than for tangible goods.

e-junkie: Another outfit specializing in digital products like eBooks. These can offer up to a 100% commission!

Rakuten Affiliate Network: This is the network formerly known as LinkShare. An established network, but not quite as big as some of the others.

Keep in mind you may need to sign up for a free account before you can see a full list of stores or businesses that participate in each program.

Not every company that has an affiliate program will work through a large network like the ones above. While it may be slightly more difficult to find these smaller programs, they may offer niche products that are more suitable for your audience (and tend to offer higher commissions!).

To find affiliate programs in your niche, try the following Google searches:

1. “Your niche” + affiliate program (for example, “pet product affiliate program”)

2. “Niche product” + “affiliate program” (for example, “dog bed affiliate program”)

3. Keyword + affiliate (for example, “dog affiliate”).

4. Keyword + “affiliate program”

5. Keyword + affiliate product

6. “Product name” + affiliate: If you already have a product in mind, try combining it with “affiliate” or “affiliate program” to see if anything pops up.

Step 2: Add affiliate links and banners to your site

This can be as simple as replacing current links with affiliate links, or adding new links within your posts. Take a look around your site, and any time you reference a particular product, add an affiliate link. Now every time someone clicks on that link and buys the product, you make a commission!

For instance, if I had a blog post listing the Top 10 swaddling blankets for babies, I could simply cut and paste an affiliate link for each of the blankets I mention. If you are using the Amazon Associates program, you would simply do a search for the product, and then click on “Link to this page” at the top of your screen (assuming you are logged into your affiliate account).

All affiliate programs will have a place on their site where you can grab your affiliate links. Most will also have an affiliate manager you can contact if you run into trouble finding or using the links.

Another great place to add affiliate links is at the end of your high traffic pages. Take a look through your analytics to see which pages get the most traction, and add a strong call to action on those pages. For instance, if I have a post about how to find a WordPress theme, I might end it with something like this: “If you’re looking for an SEO-friendly theme, here is one I recommend.”

Finally, most affiliate programs will also offer banner ads you can cut and paste onto your site. While banner ads are not nearly as effective as they used to be, it is worth testing them out on your own site.

Step 3: Create a resource page or review post to promote your affiliate products

Two of the best ways to attract interest in your affiliate products are to add a resource page or product review on your blog. While adding links within your existing content can also work, visitors to a resource page or review post will already be looking for helpful products they can buy.

For instance, if I have a site geared toward business owners, I could create a post called “The 8 Best Social Media Tools For Business Owners”. Within that post, I could include one or more affiliate links, and earn a commission for recommending tools I would have suggested anyway. Win/win!

Step 4: Create an affiliate policy and be transparent

This step is SO important, but is one that often gets neglected. It is not as exciting as the ones above, but not doing it can get you into BIG TROUBLE! Here is how: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires all affiliate marketers to clearly disclose all affiliate links. This means that if you have affiliate links on your site, you MUST be transparent about it! FTC guidelines aside, this is just a smart business practice. The last thing you want is to deceive your readers!

Worried that disclosing your affiliate links will hurt sales? Take a look at Pat Flynn’s disclosure statement, along with his monthly earnings (largely from affiliate sales):

I recommend having an official affiliate policy on your site, as well as identifyingeach and every affiliate link you use on your site. This may seem like overkill, but you don’t want to risk losing the trust of your audience!

Your affiliate policy does not have to be anything elaborate. In fact, a quick Google search for “affiliate policy sample” should do the trick nicely!

And there you have it: 4 steps for how to make money on your blog with affiliate marketing.

I’d love to hear your thoughts: Do you use affiliate marketing on your site? Are you planning to try it out? Share below!

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5 Secrets to YouTube Search Engine Optimization

SEO is more complicated than it used to be. Understanding these secrets could have a big impact on your ranking.

When you think of search engine marketing, we live in a much bigger world than just Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago, I sat in on sessions for YouTube and Facebook search optimization.

Answering what it means to be a search engine optimizer is more complicated than it used to be.

According to Alexa, the top three sites are:

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. YouTube

If you are looking to get the most exposure to the biggest audiences, you probably want to seriously consider some sort of campaigns with these sites.

In this column, I wanted to give you five secrets that you might not know about YouTube search engine optimization. Understanding these secrets could have a big impact on your ranking.

I got most of these from Greg Jarboe at his session on video optimization. I wanted to give credit where credit is due.

Secret #1

Get key phrase ideas from autocomplete suggestions.

These are currently searched key phrases at YouTube. If you are looking to make a video about something people are interested in, you definitely want to check out the autocomplete function at YouTube.

This is incredibly easy key phrase research to do. And you'll likely find some interesting topics to get your video making juices flowing.

Secret #2

Use the YouTube Keyword Suggestion Tool.

This is another great place to find ideas for key phrases for your video. You can also put a YouTube video ID in the tool and it will give you suggestions for key phrases to add to your video.

Secret #3

Use all the allowed space for titles, descriptions, and tags.

Titles should be about 100 characters.

Descriptions can include up to 5,000 characters, tags can be 120 characters. Make a goal to use every one of these limits for each of your videos.

From this YouTube blog post, "The more words you include in your description, the higher your chances of being discovered by searchers, which means the larger your audience can grow, and the more potential revenue you can earn."

Secret #4

Use annotations from this blog:

• Encourage viewers to subscribe with an annotated subscribe button.
• Use annotations to link to videos, playlists, channels, and more.
• Use annotations to encourage feedback.

OK. Annotations aren't specifically for search optimization. But they are a great way to get people to either subscribe to your channel or watch another one of your videos.

Secret #5

Try YouTube Promoted videos.

This is paid search for your videos. These are the steps:

• Choose one of your videos, write some promotional text, and tell us which keywords should trigger your promotion.
• Using your keywords, your video promotion will now appear next to contextually relevant search results.
• When a YouTube viewer clicks on your promotion, they see your video. You only pay when people click to see your video - not when people see your promotion.

YouTube is a huge opportunity for new traffic. Hopefully these tips will help you navigate that space in a more effective way.

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4 Reasons to Use Humor in Your Social Media Content

Brands that post funny stuff on social media are seen as more memorable, while also gaining insights and emotional responses from the audience.

Laughter is a universal language and one of our first communication methods. Before we had spoken or written language, humans used laughter to express our enjoyment or accession with a certain situation. It's also a form of communication that bridges the gap between various languages, cultures, ages and demographics. So it's no wonder that funny memes and witty hashtags are such a hit on social media. In fact, according to one study, "humor was employed at near unanimous levels for all viral advertisements. Consequently, this study identified humor as the universal appeal for making content viral."

So, humorous content gets shared more on social media channels. That's an obvious benefit for your brand. But what other benefits can you gain by making your audience laugh? Following are four other advantages to using humorous content.

1. It creates unity.

Laughter is social. We laugh 30 times more when we're with other people than when we're alone, according to Robert R. Provine, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Laughter eases tension and forms a sense of unity through groups. Get your Facebook fans or Twitter followers laughing, and you'll be helping to establish a sense of community and building connections with your brand and amongst your fans and followers.

2. It triggers emotional responses.

Humor creates positive feelings. Laughing releases endorphins, relaxes the body, boosts the immune system, helps to relieve stress and overall just makes us feel good. These physiological and chemical responses are unconscious, and create a pleasant emotional response. By using humor in your content on social media, you help to associate pleasant feelings with your brand.

3. It makes your brand memorable.

Positive feelings create memories. Research has shown that just 42 percent of positive experiences were forgotten, while 60 percent of negative experiences faded from memory. No one remembers a dull Facebook post or boring YouTube video, but we all remember Kmart's "I Shipped My Pants" commercials, even if we'd forgotten that Kmart was around. Making your audience feel good through humorous content will help them to remember your brand in the short- and long-term.

4. It provides audience insights.

Peter McGraw, director of the Humor Research Lab and author of the Humor Code, states that "funny" is the intersection of benign and violation. If something is benign-a everyday observation-it's not going to be funny. If something is a violation-a gross or offensive view of the world-it's also not going to be funny. But that sweet spot between everyday and offensive, that's where funny happens.

Learning where that sweet spot is for your audience can tell you a lot about their mindset, values and desires. To find this perfect junction, you may have to test things you think are too benign or too offensive, which does create some risks. But the insights you gain into your audience's mentality can be well worth the uncertainty.

Being funny helps to create stronger emotional ties with your audience, creates better brand recall and builds a closer knit community. Humor may not come naturally for your brand, and may not always be the right approach. Luckily, social media allows you to test and iterate quickly to find the best humorous tone for your brand and audience.

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