Viral Content Challenge: Grab Life by the Horns

Posted on by Joshua Goldberg

Objectives (Measurable):

My measurable objectives for the viral content challenge was to achieve 300+ views on Imgur, 10+ retweets on twitter, 400 impressions on twitter, 5+ shares on Facebook (although I never shared my meme on Facebook), 10+ new twitter followers, and 1+ influencer on any social media platform to repost my meme. Through out the duration of the viral content challenge some of these goals were successful, as I achieved 343 Imgur views and I achieved 695 impressions on Twitter.

Analysis:

My original goal was to create a funny meme that would be relevant and would proliferate throughout the Syracuse University community. I’m going to be honest in saying that the results from my social media campaign  were very underwhelming, as I didn’t get the number of views that I expected and my meme didn’t catch fire in the Syracuse community as I intended. The person in my meme is named Ross Levinsohn, he is a goofy, mistake prone, comical, and well known guy in the Syracuse community. I thought that this funny picture of him would go viral at Syracuse university, and I anticipated that this relevancy would bring me over 500+ views but I was terribly wrong. I  think that the lack of traction for my meme is due to the meme text. I really could have made my meme text a lot funnier and more relevant. I received a lot of negative feedback from my peers and the anonymous commenters on Imgur about my low quality meme text. I think that if my meme text was funnier I would have gotten much better results, especially amongst Syracuse University students.

 

What worked:

Promoting my meme on Twitter with the #dontbelikethisguy hashtag basically everyday was very effective. My most successful promotion strategy was sharing my meme in Groupme. I am in several groupmes with various members within the Syracuse University community. I posted this meme in various greek life groupies, Newhouse class groupies, and Syracuse university club groupmes, such as Tamid and the Entrepreneurship club. Promoting my meme in Groupme increased my Imgur views by about 100. I knew that Groupme would be a great way to reach members of the Syracuse University community. I also promoted my meme on snapchat, which boosted my Imgur views by 55. I found that utilizing  snapchat’s story feature was the most effective, as it expanded my reach.

What didn’t work:

As I mentioned before the meme text was an absolute disaster. I received negative feedback from numerous of my peers, as they failed to connect the text to the image. I received a lot of stickers in the class activity and this early success made me too stubborn to make any changes. But I now realize that stickers aren’t a good way to measure engagement. If  I were to do it again, I probably wouldn’t have incorporated my friend Ross Levinsohn in my meme. While Ross is a funny guy, I don’t think that he has what it takes to be a social media sensation. I received the most negative feedback in my snapchat promotion. Numerous people were confused by the content of the meme and didn’t think it was funny. One person even replied and said, “Thank you for wasting my time with this unfunny meme.” Another thing that didn’t work for me in the viral content challenge was using Instagram as promotion tactic. Although I didn’t actually post the meme on Instagram, I directly messaged numerous meme accounts to try to get them to share my meme with the hope of achieving my goal of getting one influencer with 10,000+ followers to repost my meme. If I was to get one meme account to share my meme it would have been an absolute game changer, but no meme accounts posted it due its irrelevance and unfunniness. The bottom line is that I wish I could do the viral content challenge again because I feel that I would be able to execute it much better.

Final Engagement Numbers:

Imgur Views: 343

Twitter Impressions: 695

 

The pathway to success is clear… Just don’t be like this guy

Twitter Ad results from the content challenge  

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