Making a meme go viral is hard… except for when it isn’t. Without universally appealing and hilarious content, this week I learned how hard brands and other content creators work to help their images take over the web.
The Objective:
- To have the Drama Queens meme go viral.
- To gain views in a medium saturated with memes.
The Content
I thought it was great, the people of imgur felt differently.
Twitter Webcard Tweet
The metric of success was imgur views, so I wanted to promote the webcard I made using text that I thought would generate views. An example is featured below.
https://t.co/rqjUr74Fhn thebest #meme on the internet #trump #nhsmc
— Emma Matteson (@emma_matteson) November 4, 2016
Twitter Ad Spend
To increase the likelihood of people seeing and interacting with my meme, I created a Twitter ad that promoted my content to people across the Twitter sphere. I spent $5.00 to promote the tweet for a week.
Analysis
The project was daunting to take on. There is no way to know for sure what will be popular across the internet and what will flop. I found that my followers on Twitter and other Twitter users responded to my organic tweets promoting the webcard better than they responded to the ad. Across my various promotional tweets, I had far more engagements than I had on my advertisement. I wonder if my followers, who trust my content, were more likely to engage with content I posted directly, as Twitter ads can sometimes be construed as clickbait. In the content of the tweet, I tried to lead viewers to click on the link rather than explaining the meme to them. I think this was aided by the way the image was framed in the webcard, because it wasn’t immediately obvious what the joke was.
Engagements
imgur views = 534, Twitter ad = 39.
Total = 573