Comedy Writing for Social Media

Comedy is a great way to connect with your audience. I believe that any brand can use humour and see great results, provided you know your audience and you know where their line is.

When I was getting started as a marketing freelancer, I spent a lot of time writing for clients through Fiverr. I offered batches of social posts in the form of jokes, specifically crafted for the client’s industry. This was fairly successful, and gave me a solid grounding in social copy – especially when writing batches of 100-200 posts in only a few days, which happened often.

You can enjoy some of my ghost-written listicles and posts here:

WeeblsStuff

Weebl has created some of the most recognizable content on the internet. Their brand is chaotic and colourful.

My role within the Weebl team is to edit pre-existing content so it works on social platforms. A secondary role is moderating the comments sections on Instagram and TikTok. Sometimes that’s answering questions, occasionally it’s blocking and reporting comments, but most of the time it’s boosting engagement by replying to comments. The challenge is to balance professionalism and matching Weebl’s tone.

Most of the time, I try to take comments at face value and match their energy: if someone comments in all-caps, I’ll reply in all-caps, for example.

The Conversation Hat

The Conversation Hat is irreverent, silly and kinda geeky.

I upload a variety of content for The Conversation Hat. We have the podcast, accompanying long- and short-form video, as well regular as text and image posts. It’s important that text posts match the tone of the podcast itself, so new viewers understand the brand as a whole.

Social posts are often the in-point to the brand, so it’s important they are easy to understand whilst still adhering to the brand tone. It’s also an opportunity to make is clear who the show is and (often more important), is not for.

You can see some examples below.

Straightforward jokes: setup, punchline. Sometimes we post anti-jokes, where we deliberately misinterpret the language of a setup or disregard the format of a joke. Generally speaking, these are straightforward jokes.

Trend-based posts are tonally similar to jokes, but they rely on timely events. That includes tentpole events like holidays, movie releases, or common topics of discussion from other areas of the internet.

This first batch are based on holidays and internationally observed events: pancake day, Christmas and Halloween.

This next batch are based on internet trends – conversation topics that had gained momentum in various corners of the internet.

LTGuitarist

The LTGuitarist brand is informative, self-deprecating and subtly humorous.

LTGuitarist is my personal brand. Having spent over a decade creating educational content on YouTube, I developed the brand by, simply, being myself. I’ve found that it’s possible to not take oneself seriously, whilst maintaining professionalism.

Humour and self-depreciation is vital to the LTGuitarist tone. Although the music industry is seen as vibrant and energetic, the music education and music technology fields (which I’ve found myself a part of), see to be much more dour and serious. Keeping a humorous undercurrent to my online persona is a conscious choice in order to stand out.

Humour is also an important ice-breaker. It’s for people to feel welcome if they see I don’t take myself (or my industry) too seriously. The more welcome they feel, the more comfortable they’ll be asking questions.