Virality is at once so simple and so complicated; every day, new pieces of content reach astronomical heights on Twitter and other social platforms, but it’s so hard to predict what will catch on with a large audience. For this project, I tried to manufacture virality with perhaps the most polarizing chanteuse the world has ever seen: Mariah Carey. She’s pretty much synonymous with Christmas now, so I wanted to play off of the way that people immediately get into the Christmas spirit the day after Halloween. I decided to do this by riffing on the “Friendship Ended With Mudasir” format. My objective was to garner 800 views on Imgur, which I realize now was too ambitious.
Imgur Meme:
Twitter Webcard:
for the love of god click this https://t.co/qB46WSSBlc
— Jake (@jakesmithwrites) November 12, 2018
Twitter Ads Engagement and Spend:
In this campaign, I think the subject matter helped it gain traction. Representing Christmas with Mariah Carey and Halloween with Michael Meyers was easy to decode and hopefully made sense to viewers. While it never really took off on Twitter, it got a nice amount of impressions, at 2,952. Only 26 people clicked the link. However, I ended up expanding my original engagement plan, posting the meme on Reddit. It was here that it took off organically; in the r/MariahCarey community, for example, it got 17 upvotes from Mariah fans.
If I were to promote this meme again, I would focus more on Reddit because the built-in communities there are practically made for posts like this. I would also lower the bar from 800 views to 500 because I initially wanted to sound ambitious, but I realize now that this only diminished the impact of overachieving. In the end, my meme received 964 views.