It seems like today everyone thinks that good social media content is how many Twitter followers you have or how active you are on Facebook. It is my opinion that social media is about content, mostly user-generated content. Yes, twitter updates are content, and yes Facebook apps are content, though I see some of the best content as funny content. Recently, I’ve noticed a large spike in parodies, especially of infomercials, iPhone, Tiger Woods, and “Kanye West Interrupts“. Here is a small list of some funny videos I’ve found. Enjoy!

Also, check out the Tiger Woods spoofs on Funny or Die.

NOTE: Most of the infomercial videos have cursing, so careful with the sound.

Just about everyday I receive some sort of email/Twitter spam stating they could help me “grow my business with social media” and ask me for an extraordinary amount of money to find out how. In my opinion, it’s all just a scam,  a bunch of con artists looking to make a quick buck off the gullible. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is NOT about how to grow your business, it’s about content, it’s about people sharing content, content they find entertaining, content worth sharing. If you look at YouTube‘s Most Viewed (All Time) videos, you’ll see they’re all entertaining videos, none of product pitches or corporate brand videos.

Cuteness = Lots of viewers

Marketeers today are looking for the best way to make their campaigns viral, looking for the secret ingredient to getting people to send their links to a friend. Below I’ve listed some videos on YouTube of some popular videos that have a large amount of views. I’ve worked on many marketing campaigns and the goal is to get people to view your pitch, it would be fantastic if I could get 10,000,000+ people to view a campaign in little as 2 months as is the case with video #1 (surprised kitty). With Surprised Kitty (video #1), it’s getting 183,000+ views a day, why, because it’s soooooo frickin’ cute!

The tip is to be cute, to be something worth sharing. I’ve seen lots of marketing campaigns that are just so boring, although some of great value/good deals, just nothing I would send to a friend, more of something I would probably bookmark and maybe lookup later. I am not here to tell you how to be cute, this is something you’ll need to find on your own, and hopefully you will.

Your video does not have to be long, as you see, video #1 the Surprised Kitty is 17 seconds, the highest viewed video (139,000,000+) on YouTube is only 55 seconds (video #2 below), a 16 second video of a panda sneezing (video # 7) has 46,000,000+ views, and who could forget the 5 second video of the Dramatic Look gerbil with 18,000,000+ views.

Something is better than nothing

I know I’ve fallen into the trap being a perfectionist and taking forever to post something because I always find ways to make it better (to me). Most of the popular videos are NOT planned videos, most are spontaneous raw footage. For Surprised Kitty, it’s only 17 seconds long and I’m sure the author probably thought about not posting it and had no clue it would get 10 million views in 2 months. I have a friend who had a cute video of her adorable daughter dancing, though she is not a YouTube person and most likely will never be upload it to YouTube (it’s currently only on Facebook). Then again, what is a “YouTube person”, I’m not sure there is a definition.

I wonder how much cute videos are out there that will never get uploaded. For me, growing up my mother had a camera on us ALL THE TIME and filmed just about everything we did growing up. In a way, I’m glad my mother doesn’t have a YouTube account, I dread the day she does, because I know there’s tons of embarrassing stuff she has on tape, ooooooh boy!

I have an amazingly adorable pet, a dog named Ashley who I wish I could capture on video, though every time I try she is too distracted by the camera. I’ll try and try again until I get that cute video of Ashley doing something cute!

Share!

So, to my point, the true power and secret in social media is people sharing, not only those who pass around links, it’s really the power of the people that upload the content, the people who for a brief moment let us view a part of their life, may it be funny or not, the act of sharing is the real secret of the new dawn of today’s internet. Below are some YouTube videos I found that are of cute babies and cute animals that have some great numbers on views, some  videos have 200+ comments a day (video #2 & video #3).

NOTE: STATISTICS PULLED FROM YOUTUBE USING THIER DATA API.

Please email me other videos you think should be on this list.