The saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words, well memes may be worth a lot more these days. Memes have become an integral part of internet culture, everyone from teens to politicians use them to get a point across. When tasked with creating a meme I immediately thought of a challenge that everyone experiences, regardless of age – unassigned assigned seats. Though this issue tends to plague students the most, it is still an issue that adults face when attending meetings, church, or even getting on a train for their morning commute. To get the most views possible on this meme I deployed a meme marketing plan.

Marketing Plan Objectives

• Engagement: Users interact with the meme on Imgur, the image host site, through either upvoting, downvoting, or commenting their own experiences that relate to this meme.
  • Virality: For this challenge virality was considered 500 views on Imgur, for my own virality I benchmarked 40 likes on Twitter and a total of 25 retweets on Twitter.

Twitter Webcard

Throughout my campaign, I used a variety of tweets and hashtags in attempts to reach my engagement and virality objectives. I tweeted my webcard out a total of 3 times changing up the copy and timing of the tweets each time.

When you walk into class and your seat is taken. #nhsmc https://t.co/KCIJSrV2Qd

— Meghan Flynn (@meghankateflynn) April 4, 2018

Other examples of Tweet copy include:

When someone snatches your seat #NHsmc #dontsnatchmyseat

Don’t be that person #NHsmc #dontsnatchmyseat 

Twitter Ads Engagement & Spend 

For this campaign, I set a total ad spend of $5.00 and throughout the course of a day that total spend was executed. During my viral content challenge I experienced minimal luck on Twitter to get engagement on the tweets themselves, however, my Imgur views and engagement continued to grow daily. However, when looking at the impressions metrics on Twitter Ads I have received 1,739 impressions on the tweets that I selected to promote.

Analytics & Effectiveness of Campaign

This campaign was interesting in terms of final metrics and trends I noticed over the course of the campaign. Almost immediately this campaign took off on Imgur, the post was timed to be posted on  Monday morning and I ‘lucked out’ with it being the day after Easter and regular Churchgoers were still upset about their seats being taken. This trend continued throughout the course of my campaign and I found I consistently had more engagement on Imgur than Twitter – therefore I would change hashtags on my Imgur post daily in an effort to get a new audience. In addition to posting this meme on Imgur and Twitter, I used my Instagram followers – on both my test and real account, in attempts to drive traffic to the meme, this proved not as effective due to the lack of ‘clickability’ on Instagram. Finally, I posted this meme on Pinterest, an idea that came to me when I was literally lying in bed scrolling through Pinterest laughing at a meme. In total, my final engagement numbers on Imgur were 1,658 views with 10 comments and 46 points received; this engagement surpassed my expectations by a great deal. There was a weird glitch when I was changing hashtags one day and the image was posted twice and therefore I have different total view counts on the same image – for this metric I took the higher total and for the total comments and points I added the two together.