Going Viral | Viral Content Challenge Analysis

Posted on by Bethany Bourgault

“Going viral” is all the rage on the Internet. Probably because anything that’s actually all the rage, is viral.

I made a meme based on two things I figured my social media audience would relate to. I referenced finals week, since my audience is mostly made up of college students, and I used a photo of my cat, since everyone loves a good crazy cat photo every now and again.

My challenge was to “go viral,” or, for the sake of the assignment, get 500+ views of my meme on Imgur. Unfortunately, I didn’t reach that number, and I have a few thoughts on why that might have been the case. First, let’s start with my original objectives:

Objectives

• I hope to see my meme get over 500 views on Imgur.
• I hope to get 5 likes on my Tweets.
• I hope to see 2-3 shares on my Facebook post.

I’m a bit frustrated to report that none of these came to fruition. However, I think I’ve identified a few reasons why I only accomplished a series of “almost’s” instead of seeing my meme take off. Here are my thoughts:

Analysis

I didn’t get 500 views on Imgur. However, I think I’ve identified a technical glitch that might have afforded me at least a few more views than the 300 that I’m seeing on my view count now.


That’s the post I originally put on Twitter. That one got 90+ views on the first day, and linked to this Imgur image:

Then, in an effort to get even more engagement, I went into my Imgur account to add tags. I somehow ended up with a second Imgur post of the same meme. Which I then promoted in a Twitter Webcard here:


That meme got 300 views.

I think that had I put the tags and hashtags into the Imgur post at the very first step, I could have accumulated all of the views on one meme, thus finishing this assignment with a higher view count.
I also think there were a few things wrong with the meme itself that I didn’t realize until mid-way through the campaign. I was too excited about sharing a common struggle of being a student (finals week) to remember that it wasn’t actually finals week yet.

The meme was also rather dark, and though I brightened it in Photoshop after our dot voting exercise, it was still darker than most memes out there.

I didn’t get 5 likes on Twitter, but I got 4, which is honestly pretty good for my Twitter audience engagement. I think that my average loyal like-ers liked one of the posts featuring the meme, and when they saw the meme pop up again and again, just ignored it. If I were to do this again, I would take more time to brainstorm more creative copy for my tweets.

As for the Facebook post – I decided against posting the meme to my Facebook page. I wasn’t sure that my Facebook audience would really understand what was going on if I were to just post it, since I really only use my Facebook for promoting my blog and posting the occasional photo. Instead, I posted it to my sorority’s Facebook group page. Eight people liked it and 165 people saw it, but I think probably only those 8 people that liked it clicked on it. (I was monitoring the view count on Imgur after posting – it didn’t move as much as I’d hoped it would.)

If I were to re-do the assignment, I would get over my hesitation and just go for posting it on my normal page. My Facebook audience is generally far more engaged than my Twitter audience, and I probably could have at least gotten some shares from my family.

Something that did go well, though, was my Twitter Ads campaign.

According to the Twitter Ads analytics page, I got 914 impressions out of my ad, and of those 914, 62 people clicked on my link. I enjoyed being able to customize to whom Twitter would send my ads, choosing the demographics, interests, education levels, location, etc. of the recipients. This gave me a 6.78% engagement rate.

Final Engagement Number: 300 views on Imgur (plus those 97 on that other post?), 4 Twitter likes, 8 Facebook likes

This assignment was a lot of fun – and I learned a lot from playing around with the different programs. I feel much more confident jumping into Twitter Ads than I did before, and know now to really think about the relevance of what I’m posting.

If this meme takes off once it’s actually finals week, I’ll keep you posted.

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