How do ya'll think tonight's gonna go? #electionday #govote
— Mac Konrad (@MacMcKonrad) November 6, 2018
GOALS:
- To get 500 views on Imgur
- For people on Twitter to see my deep link to imgur and click on it
- To crack a dark joke about the nature of news regardless of how you individually feel
Analysis:
My campaign was plagued with some issues that stifled my meme from reaching it’s maximum reach. However, I still believe my meme is effectively communicating the message I wanted to send. Pessimism is a popular form of comedy online and if this meme is anything it’s pessimistic.
Another sign of my meme’s effectiveness is the fact that I had 5 upvotes by the end of the challenge and no downvotes. Having content that is 100% liked on the internet is very difficult to do and yet over the course of two and a half weeks no one disliked my meme enough to downvote it.
Originally, I thought planning my meme around election day would increase it’s chance of going viral due to people’s fears about losing politically. Even though I still think I had the right mentality, my execution on this front was not good. While I set up a broad audience for my Twitter ad campaign, a mistake in my target audience straight up halted my campaign during election day.
This mistake was likely the biggest detriment to my meme’s virality because I had planned the meme to be run all election day. I had even titled the IMGUR post “A Pre-election Prediction…” My original marketing plan goes into even more detail about how I expected the meme to play with voters. In retrospect I should’ve used a more general title like “News these days.”
My meme was capped at 330 views as of November 23rd. However, because my ad campaign never went through (and therefore I never actually spent 5$) I decided to create a 2nd campaign to see how my meme would fare over the last couple days.
This campaign went through and got 778 impressions in total during it’s runtime. While I was happy to see the impressions nearly reach 1000, it didn’t translate into views for my meme on IMGUR. As of November 26th my meme only gained roughly 10 views during the campaign.
It may not be what I had originally wanted but I was glad that I did get the exposure, and more importantly, the correct experience with Twitter ads.
Conclusion:
In hindsight I shouldn’t have tailored my meme to the election. While it was smart to create a meme to pair with an upcoming, controversial cultural event, the limited scope ultimately stunted my virality.
The other issue was my difficulties with Twitter ads. This issue was much harder to avoid because I personally found Twitter ads to be unintuitive. It was very important though and in future campaigns would be the first issue I have solved.