To make my meme featured below go viral, I created a marketing plan involving goals, objectives, a calendar, strategy, and budget to ensure success. This plan was creative, original, and detailed.
Objective:
- To receive 500 views or more on my meme by tracking through Imgur.
It was established beforehand that 500 views on the meme qualified as going viral. I was able to reach over 2,000 views on my meme because I followed my marketing plan closely. Planning out which social media platforms I would use beforehand proved extremely helpful and ensured I was using the correct language for each site. The Imgur community took to the meme well, resulting in over 50 overall “ups,” which exceeded my expectations for points received. I even received some comments, which were great engagement.
Imgur meme:
As seen above, I used a caption that would relate back to a human feeling. It seems obvious that making a relatable meme (and caption) garners more impressions than content that does not resonate, but clearly not all content on the Internet is liked. Sometimes what one person thinks is funny is actually not as funny to others, which is why I thought doing dot-voting IRL in class benefitted me. I realized my original meme did not resonate well with my audience, so I was able to take a different approach once I saw animals went over well and saw that funny things were most likely to be shared.
Twitter Webcard Tweet:
How wide can a cat's eyes become? #cats #animals #kitten #NHsmc
— Jessica Beyer (@jesstbeyer) November 7, 2018
This was the tweet I constructed to promote my Twitter webcard. The objective of this card was to get people to click on the image and drive traffic to the Imgur link to increase my views. I launched this the first night of my campaign an hour after I posted my meme to Imgur. I chose to do this because I realized one gets the most engagement when the content is first posted. In order to keep interaction high, I tweeted this webcard out once I saw the meme was getting a lot of attention on Imgur. I wanted the Twitter audience to see the meme, think it was funny, then retweet and/or share it to other social sites to keep engagement high at the beginning of its launch. This proved to work extremely well as I reached 500 views within the first hour of posting to Imgur, and then continued to garner hundreds of impressions after tweeting out the webcard. I did not include the meme text in the image to prompt people to want to click on the card. I only led with “That look when…” to leave people hanging. The hashtags I used received a lot of traffic because they were more general. I also found that captioning the tweet with a question can sometimes make people more curious, and thus push them to want to click to learn more.
The above screen shot shows my $5.00 budget that I spent promoting my webcard tweet on Twitter. I only received 456 impressions over the set time span of 11/7-11/12. I targeted my followers, @newhousesu, @anImallovers, and @Ilovemycat. This did not prove to be a great strategy because I received under 500 impressions. Next time to receive more impressions I will have to look at other accounts that would enjoy the humor of my meme, and then analyze the best time to post, instead of just looking at the best time to post based on my followers. I should also have adjusted my campaign as I saw my meme was performing better on IOS devices instead of Android devices. It should also be noted that among my followers, the top interest is dogs, not cats. Whether or not this could have impacted the low number of impressions is unclear, but it could have been a factor.
Further Analysis:
The goals that I started with were to make the meme go viral, learn how to use social media and paid promotions to market a piece of content, and then be able to analyze what worked and what did not. I succeeded in achieving all of my goals: I received above 500 views on my meme, used multiple social media platforms to promote my content, and was able to gauge how much engagement came from each post. I also now have a better understanding of how to reach niche audiences, and I better understand the importance of analyzing interests of an audience and gauging the time of day when an audience is most active. Lastly, I feel that I am capable of recommending which social media platform(s) to use depending on the type of content being marketed because my marketing plan allowed me to see that Facebook is better for longer posts, while Instagram and Reddit are better for shorter copy. My marketing plan laid out how my voice and tone would sound across platforms and made me cognizant of being repetitive.
Posting to my Instagram story worked well because I directed my followers to click the Imgur link in my bio. The story left my followers almost on a cliffhanger, so it encouraged them to go to my bio and engage with the link. Engagement tends to work better with people you know. When my network of friends saw my post, they would share it on Instagram and Facebook (not so much Twitter), and then their friends would click the link. Word of mouth seemed to be the most powerful form of communication because people trust those close to them. Posting in my GroupMe chats proved beneficial to gaining more views because I was able to directly communicate with smaller groups at a time, which held them all more accountable to help me get more views. Reddit I believe complemented my campaign nicely because I posted in the r/cats stream. There was other similar content being circulated, which is why I thought it was a good idea to share my meme with the r/cats community. Because Reddit is a site that is extremely link friendly, this tied my campaign nicely together. The weakest part of my campaign was Twitter because I only have 39 followers. Neither my webcard tweet nor any of my other promotional tweets gained any engagement. This shows that I first need to grow my Twitter following to be able to make a significant dent in the number of views my meme received.
My marketing plan strategically spaced out my posts on my various platforms to avoid burnout on one site. From my own experiences, when I see a post multiple times on the same platform in a short period of time, it serves as a nuisance, which decreases the likelihood I will engage with the content. Even thought my tweets received little engagements, scheduling my tweets in Tweetdeck was very helpful because I knew I was going to post when my followers were active on the platform. I used Followerwonk to see my followers’ activity. To keep my voice and tone consistent, I used the same language, but changed the call to action. For example, on Reddit I said “How wide can a cat’s eyes get? Click to find out!” while on my Twitter webcard I wrote, “How wide can a cat’s eyes become?” and used multiple hashtags. On my more personal networks, like Facebook, Instagram, and GroupMe, I was able to use less general captions and more intimate ones such as “Click here to brighten your day :)!” and “Here is my cat Muffin’s feature. Cuteness overload if you ask me!”
The highest engagement I received on Twitter was nine engagements on a tweet tweeted by one of my friends. This substantiated my claim before when I said friends sharing the meme resulted in a high level of engagement for me. Additionally, I found that using more general hashtags on Twitter and Imgur such as “animals,” “cats,” and “kittens,” worked better than hashtags like “surprised,” “uh oh,” and “expressions.” I figured this out by posting two separate times to Imgur and Twitter at the beginning of the campaign. The first time I posted to Imgur at 10pm on a week day and only received 200 views after a day. On Twitter, I had received little to no impressions on my webcard using non-general hashtags and giving some of the meme’s text away in the card. When I posted to Imgur the following day at 4PM I immediately received 500 views. I received more clicks on my webcard as well when I did not include any of the meme’s text overlay.
Overall, I used multiple platforms, but stayed consistent in voice, tone, and message. By alternating platforms throughout the week of 11/5-11/12, I avoided burnout. I also tapped into my intimate connections in addition to my general social media network. Using Followerwonk and Tweetdeck were helpful tools for analysis and scheduling. I learned that the better aligned the content is with a community’s sense of humor, the better the meme will perform, and that working both strong and weak connections will be beneficial. I am very happy with my marketing plan and the initial strategy of analyzing Imgur’s audience from the start. This plan resulted in over 2,000 views on my meme, making my content go viral.
Final Views Number 11/5-11/12: 2,122