Introduction
Going viral is a goal that social media users dream of. We’ve all been there. You think of a fire tweet, look it over several times, throw in a couple of hashtags for more engagement, but other people don’t seem to find that tweet as “likebale” as you had hoped. You then lose the eagerness to tweet and shy away from it for a couple of days. Is going viral really that hard? Do you have to pay in order to get several hundred views? Fortunately, for you, the answer is no. All you need is to come up with a tweet or meme that people can relate to and a plan.
While some social media marketing plans to have a section for a budget, a quality tweet or meme should be able to go viral without costing you your recent paycheck. For me, I came up with a tweet that people my age, and even parents, could enjoy. The meme was focused on the Pixar movie, Finding Dory. In this movie, Dory stumbles her way into a room where fish are being held quarantine in the hopes of being reunited with her parents. During this scene, a fish sneezes while the others swim to the other side of the tank so they don’t get sick again. This scene reminded me of how people are staying socially distant from each other due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I figured comparing today’s precautions to a Pixar movie would be able to put a smile on people’s faces and hopefully shed some light during a dark time for some people.
Objective
The objective of my meme was to reach over 300 views on Imgur. I was able to successfully reach that goal thanks to my marketing plan. The plan was to post the link to the meme on Imgur through four different social media accounts. It is important to note that you should post your link to accounts that are easy to click on URLs. Some platforms, like Instagram, make it difficult for a URL to go “live”. The four platforms I used were Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. With the range of four different counts, I was able to successfully reach my goal of at least 300 views. Within Reddit and Facebook, I shared the post with coronavirus meme pages. This helped me direct my content to people who would definitely be interested and would be more likely to share it if they enjoyed it.Narrowing down your audience avoids your post from getting lost in the abundance of posts on a social media site.
Pros
What worked the best for me (where I noticed the greatest increase of views) was using proper tags on Imgur. I had the greatest jump in views the first night I posted the meme on Imgur. I used the following relevant tags to help the meme gain traction: Pixar, Coronavirus, Finding Dory, covid19, and coronavirusmemes.
When you are able to use relevant tags, it helps others find your meme when they want to find things on Imgur based on a category or helping link your meme to relevant content they may already be looking at.
Cons
What did not workout for me was staying on track with my market plan. I completely forgot to do the last two posts for my meme until the day of class on the 6th. I have a feeling that this bogged down my viewership because not a lot of people are checking social media in the middle of the day on a Monday. They are either at work or in class and not paying attention to their phone. I think if I stuck to my market plan religiously, I would’ve been able to enhance the amount of views I had.
Result and Embedded Meme
Fortunately, I was still able to achieve my goal. As of right now, I have a current Imgur viewer count of 328.