For the NHsmc viral content challenge, I created a meme of Michael Scott, a popular fictional character from the mockumentary series The Office.
The meme included a caption – Michael Scott knows! – as well as several hashtags to draw in engagement straight from the Imgur site. My campaign lasted for about 8 days, but the majority of it was handled early on to maximize engagement over the campaign. Overall, my objective was to reach well over 500 views and to have the meme be shared on Twitter sufficiently to create even more impressions and engagement.
My campaign was built on several different forms of sharing the meme I created. First, of course, I uploaded the meme to Imgur at 12:01 on the morning of April 3rd. By the time I woke up on the morning of the 3rd, it had already accumulated over 200 views. I was pretty pleased with that engagement. The trick that I used to boost that number was to hashtag #The_office, which Imgur said was a popular topic on the site.
Next, I created a Twitter web card to host the link to my meme on Imgur. On the evening on April 3rd, I tweeted out the web card with a quick prompt to try to get people to click on my meme.
Check out why Michael Scott is in such a good mood! https://t.co/RMmA7sDweL #NHsmc
— Nick Fathergill (@nf0412) April 3, 2017
Unfortunately, this didn’t work very well. I think I should probably have included more hashtags on the tweet itself, instead of simply on Imgur. Also, I didn’t really give a specific prompt to click – it made it appear too much like click-bait. If I could do it again, I would change those two things on the initial tweet.
Then, I used Twitter Ads to promote my tweet. Unfortunately, I was only able to find the $10 option instead of only $5. However, it cost me nothing to print out my meme, so the final budget of $10 worked out well. The promotion of my tweet gained a lot of impressions.
However, even though I had over 5,000 impressions over the next day or so, my picture only got about 20 more views from the promoted tweets. The majority of my 2,000+ views came from two other things I did later in the campaign, which significantly helped me reach my goal.
First, I updated the Imgur post to include 3 more hashtags: #Guacamole, #Michael_Scott, and #Eat_What_You_Want. The first two directly apply to the meme, and the third hashtag is very popular on Imgur and also applies to the meme. The morning after I updated these hashtags, the meme had over 500 views.
However, the best thing I did came the next day. My roommate and I were talking about Reddit, and we decided that I should put my meme on the Dunder Mifflin sub-Reddit page (Dunder Mifflin being the fictional company where Michael Scott works). Over the next two days, my Imgur post went from just above 500 to well over 2,000 views. Reddit is a great tool – tons of people use it, and the people on the Dunder Mifflin page would be very likely to click on a picture of Michael Scott.
Overall, the campaign went pretty well. After some disappointing results from the Twitter Ads, I think going outside the box helped me a lot. Reddit was super helpful, but even thinking about the project and making more hashtags was enough. Going forward, I think that’s what I’ll take away from this project. Even if you think something is over or you may have been “well enough”, never stop thinking of new ways to promote your content or yourself.
Final View Count: 2,065