Objectives
What’s the first step when starting a campaign to make a funny college meme go viral? Setting specific goals!
Firstly, I wanted to create general awareness of the meme. Moreover, I wanted to engage the main target group consisting of German and American students to interact with my meme. Lastly, I was hoping to get an increase in followers on Twitter by promoting funny content.
My measurable objectives:
- 600 people have seen the meme on Imgur
- 10% engagement rate on twitter for every content related to the meme
- 3 more people have followed me on Twitter after the campaign period
Analysis
First of all, I’d like to point out that the outcome of the campaign that ran from 11/05/18 until 11/12/18 can be used to improve further campaigns. To do so, it is important to have a look on what worked and what could have been more successful. Even though I achieved the first objective, I assume there could have been even more views, comments and votings on Imgur. Instead of five possible tags on Imgur, I accidentally only used one tag. I was surprised that the Imgur community generated the most clicks in a very short time period. As I know now, it is not possible to add tags once you’ve published a post. To conclude, with four more hashtags, more Imgur users would have probably seen the meme.
Imgur Meme
Another platform I used for spreading the meme is Twitter. In addition to the promoted webcard post below, I posted another tweet in order to gain clicks on Imgur. Both tweets were written in a humorous way. I thought this would help to increase the engagement within the target group. Referring to the webcard, I targeted my tweet to people in the United States and Germany. Furthermore, I used the keyword college and tried to target followers of Newhouse, SU and my school in Germany to make sure that people can relate to the meme. Moreover, I cropped the picture so that people were more willing to click on the post in order to see the whole meme.
Twitter Webcard
When you’re happy that midterms are over, but then you remember that finals are coming soon #college #memes #NHsmc
— Anna Relle (@AnnaMRelle) November 5, 2018
Regarding the second objective, there is an interesting difference between the engagements of the webcard post in general and the engagements I targeted from the paid post. The webcard post had 257 impressions and 39 engagements in total which results in an engagement rate of 15,2%. With 9 likes this has even been the most liked content I have ever posted on Twitter. I guess this is owned to the fact that many of my friends could relate to the situation stated in the post. Therefore, the 10% engagement objective has been accomplished. The second post to promote the meme also reached the goal by 12%. However, as can be seen in the picture below, with 2,100 impressions in total, the campaign post only had 41 engagements. The engagement rate of roughly 2 % implies that the vast majority did not decide to click on the link. For future campaigns, there should maybe be a clear call for action so that people rather click on the link.
Twitter Ads Engagement and Spend
Lastly, I reached the third goal with an increase of three followers after the campaign has ended. Nevertheless, it is hard to measure whether the increase in followers was due to the meme. What contradicts this, is that I gained no new followers on the day the meme promoting content was posted. Unfortunately, the promotion of the meme on Facebook and WhatsApp stories did not work out very well. Turns out that people on WhatsApp did not have to click on the link to see the post. The same issue occurred on Facebook: users did not feel urged to click on the link because it was almost completely shown in the the post.
To conclude, I feel like the strategy of my campaign worked. Although I’ve reached all the goals, I think it would have been better to use a picture of an existing meme or a more general picture. The picture of myself was quite old school and specific, hence I think just a few people on Imgur voted or commented on the meme. In contrast to this, my followers on Twitter seemed to like the meme more. Since most of them know me in personal, the humor is better understood. Moreover, they maybe liked the tweet because they recognized me in the picture.
Final engagement
Overall, I received 2,010 impressions on my Twitter Ad, as well as 618 views on Imgur.