Objective and Background
My objectives for this assignment were to get at least 500 views on my meme on Imgur, and to push out 4+ social media posts in order to promote the meme. In the meme I chose to remix, a user will compare two things, listing a few qualities about that thing. The obviously right choice will have some characteristics that make it seem unappealing, while the obviously implausible choice will have some characteristics that make it seem appealing, even though it’s ridiculous. Some of my favorite examples are:
throwing bread at ducks
– bad for them
– old ladyishthrowing bread at me
– thank you— Jeb the llama (@LlamaInaTux) November 5, 2019
“losing/taking virginity”
– turns sex into an object
– places pressure on the decision
– you don’t actually lose or take anything ?“sexual debut”
– exciting
– all focus is on u
– suggests a musical number is involved— lotty (@lottydoes) November 4, 2019
saying you’re celebrating your 2 year anniversary:
-dull
-overused
-nobody caressaying you’ve been together for 4 brexit extensions:
-original
-spicy
-culturally poignant— saz (@sarahlostctrl) October 28, 2019
Imgur Meme
My meme played off of this structure by making a joke about how people eat live goldfish mostly as a hazing or initiation ritual and compared it with the goldfish cracker that everyone clearly enjoys.
The final engagement number for my meme is 877 views.
Campaign Analysis
The part that I found most difficult about this campaign was link accessibility. Part of my strategy was to use my primary Instagram account, which has 1,561 engaged followers, to influence them to click the link to my meme. Because Instagram stories do not support hyperlinks, I had to post the link in the website field of my Instagram bio. Instagram kept taking down my Imgur link because it thought I was violating community guidelines, which disallowed for a consistent way for people to access the meme. The link did work when I posted it in my sorority Facebook group, but did not get a lot of engagement on the post itself. That could have been a symptom of the time of day, or the fact that Emma and Liz both posted their links before mine so people were not as excited. Snapchat was actually the platform that worked best to promote this link because it allows swipe ups to links that Instagram does not (only if you are a business partner on IG). I have a fair amount of friends on Snapchat and was receiving DM’s from people who enjoyed my meme, so I believe that people were swiping up to view it. I also sent the link in group chats, to my family, my friends, and I made a Reddit account to try my luck there. I believe these strategies helped grow my view count and increased engagement.
When I posted the meme itself on Twitter, it had a lot of good engagement with 15 likes and one retweet. It gained 489 impressions, had 55 engagements and ended up with an 11.2% engagement rate, which is high for Twitter. When I posted the Imgur link to the meme on Twitter, my tweet hardly got any interactions. While I understand that Imgur makes it easier to see the views, I believe that people enjoy interacting more with a photo or tweet of the meme itself rather than with a link. The extra step can deter engagement because it takes you off the platform that you are currently on.