Blogs like Engadget and the Cheezburger Network, videos from Internet celebrity ShayCarl and CollegeHumor as well as podcasts like The 404 and Distorted View have used humor very well and have developed their own loyal fan base. Some of these have even expanded their presence to memes, merchandise and both on and offline marketing opportunities that have spawned advertising deals with other brands.

These entities, among others, have proven that whether sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek or dark and controversial, spreading humor on your content is definitely a good way to get your message across while attracting readers and beefing up site traffic.

But before anything else—
While it sure looks easy enough for anyone with a sense of humor to pimp every blog post or multimedia content for your site, it’s best to make a quick but in-depth study first that carefully considers three important things:

Your brand–
The brand you represent, whether an established one or a new player in the industry, already has an image. You can choose to either simply beef it up or make an all-out effort to change it in a way that’s not demean to its products, services and ongoing relationship with clients. By using this as your anchor, you can gauge if being funny will at all be effective to enhance your brand’s public image.

The Existing Marketing Campaign–
Make sure you’re not overstepping on any marketing-driven personality your team has set up in the past. If there is an actively existing one, it’s probably a great idea to work it out with the entire team whether you should even implement humor or not. This is pretty crucial especially if it goes against their preset standards and can potentially upset ongoing and upcoming strategies.

Your Existing and Target Audience–
it’s always important to know your demographic. You can use this knowledge to determine the brand of humor you can work by and the references you can use to make sure whatever you put out there is apt for them and not something they’d find inappropriate.

It helps a lot in boosting your brand’s online presence and your site’s user experience by making the content engaging. This can give your brand’s otherwise corporate-ish image a youthful personality easily relatable and easy to form connections with.

When done right, humor-littered content can ensure frequently repeated visits from your existing audience while attracting new ones garnered through social networks. This makes it easy for you to monitor online mentions and conversations and transforms your followers into standalone promotion engines for you or your brand.

Tags: Comedy, content, content creation, Humor, Social Media