This past week I had the chance to experiment with the power of social media. The mission was simple: make a meme go viral. The meme was to be created and shared on Imgur, a platform used to share GIF and meme content. With over 250 million users uploading over 15 million images a day, this was no easy undertaking. Let’s further break down the goals of this mission:
Objective:
Virality, a term that needs to be defined clearly before any mission, was to be met by the following objectives:
- Receive 500 views on Imgur
- Receive 20 favorites on Twitter
- Receive 5 retweets on Twitter
These objectives were to be met in the span of one week from the deployment of the meme on Imgur (4/2).
The Meme:
Of course the most important part of this challenge was to create a meme so funny, so shareable, that no one could resist viewing the image and sharing it out to their channels. Timeliness was a key player in this challenge. Although it may not feel like summer in the city of Syracuse, NY- the rest of the country is beginning to enjoy Spring weather. This made a meme about the changing of the seasons, and everything that comes with it, a perfect candidate for virality.
The image used was one of my younger brother, making it original content, that had no chance of being utilized in the past by another meme-maker, making it fresh and interesting.
See final meme below.
The Campaign
While I thought my meme was amusing, I needed to create a plan to make sure it attracted the attention, and warmed the hearts, of others.
The first step involved figuring out who I wanted to target to make sure that this meme got into the right hands. I decided on a primary audience of college students, both male and female, who rely on summer vacations to create prime Instagram posts flexing hard and looking tan, neither of which seem attainable after the lazy winter months. This meant targeting those who follow popular college accounts that create humorous, sarcastic, and relatable content such as @tfln, @barstoolcuse, @MattBellassai,@buzzfeed @wes1, @collegehumor.
Next, I had to decide on my tools to spread this meme ASAP. I settled on a mix of Twitter and Facebook posts. This was based on the belief that between my own personal community, the natural virality of the Twitter world, the ability to schedule Tweets ahead of time with TweetDeck, and a paid promotional Tweet using Twitter Ads, I would have a good chance of meeting my objective.
I titled my campaign, “Summer is Coming”. This was a spin on the popular HBO series, “Game of Thrones” (GoT) promotion of their highly-anticipated season 6 premier. In their campaign, the phrase, “Winter is coming” went viral as a result of fans excited to see what the season had in store. GoT is extremely popular among my target audience, so I knew playing to the fan-base would help rather than hurt my chances of achieving virality. I decided on the hashtag #SummerIsComing to poke fun at the shadows of the looming summer months.
As for the plan itself I decided on posting the meme at night-time hours. According to research done by Buffer, the evening and nighttime hours are when Tweets receive the most engagement in the form of likes, retweets, and clicks. Additionally, college students are very active on social media during the evening and night hours as they attempt to procrastinate work or check their social channels before bed.
Editorial Calendar
The editorial calendar displays the mix of Tweets, promoted and un-promoted, and Facebook posts, that were used to reach my goal.
The Results
- Views on Imgur
- Goal: 500
- Actual: 759
- Favorites on Twitter
- Goal: 20
- Actual: 29
- Retweets on Twitter
- Goal: 5
- Actual: 8
As you can see, virality was met. However, I learned what worked and what did not work along the way, making me better armed for future challenges.
What worked:
Hashtags: I have to admit, I originally doubted the power of Imgur. However, within ten minutes of posting my meme onto the platform, I already had 300 views. This was due to using enough hashtags to come up in a multitude of searches. I used about ten hashtags from #sweaterweather to #collegefeels to #summer to make sure that this meme could be found in many different ways.
TweetDeck: Pre-scheduling the Tweets was extremely helpful. More so, being able to adjust the content before it was deployed, and not have to worry about remembering the post at certain times, helped drive the success of this campaign.
TwitterAds: This was my first experience using TwitterAds, however, I would recommend it to multiple users trying to obtain virality. On the platform you are able to target followers of certain accounts. I used this to create a Webcard that would target followers of accounts for college students (see under “Campaign” for details). The Webcard is below:
It's April…and you know what the means…#SummerIsComing.
— Lucy Sutphin (@thoughtsbylucy) April 3, 2018
While I believe I can expand the audience I target in future campaigns, knowing that more engagement comes from a wider audience, however, I believe the $5 I spent on promoting this Tweet were beneficial. I got five Favorites and 200 more views after the deployment of the Webcard. Below is an image showing how TwitterAds reported the engagements. As you can see, the most engagement occured directly after the promotion was deployed. Because of the small budget my Webcard was only shown to users for about a day and a half, however, it had 1,717 impressions in this small span of time.
What didn’t work:
Facebook: I was very surprised by the lack of interaction my post received after posting it on Facebook. I thought that I would receive more engagement as my friends and family know my brother, who has featured in the meme, and would be more inclined to click to see the full image. However, my post only received about 4 likes- which is extremely below average for my normal postings.
While Facebook is a popular platform to share memes, I realize that it is not “on brand” for me to do so, making some confused why I suddenly was avidly posting a meme. This helped me see the power of having a voice and tone on a platform and how it can be difficult to quickly change once it has been established.
Additionally, it was only my Facebook friends who could see the meme as my posting was private. With all the changes to Facebook’s algorithms, who knows how many actually had the chance to see the status update.
Originally, I had more scheduled Facebook posts. However, I adjusted my plan to include more Tweets and take out any ore Facebook posts after the lack of engagement.
Original Content: I was excited to share my meme because I used an original photo. I realize that memes play on the power of pop-culture to attract attention. I believe if I had used another photo, from a TV show (maybe even Game of Thrones), strangers may have been more apt to viewing the image.
Final Thoughts:
This challenge helped me better understand the role of a social media manager on a day-to-day basis. It helped me learn the decisions they have to make when planning content for their channels. While some channels were used to their fullest, others did not provide the right tools to push my meme out. In the future I will be able to use the skills I learned to create powerful content and make sure it is seen by the right eyeballs at the right time.