Background

Finals week is approaching, and that is a time where people really buckle down: pulling crazy hours studying and needing to stay up late. Oftentimes, people turn to good ‘ol coffee to get their caffeine fix.

Even though some people drink coffee for different reasons than others, coffee is kind of an evergreen topic. People are always drinking coffee and it is something relatable. Some of us drink coffee more than others would consider “normal”, or at least we think we do, so this meme aims to target those people who think they drink an obsessive amount of coffee or those who just really love it. It could also target those people who may not drink coffee on the daily, but have been having a hard week and really need something to give them a boost. Let’s get real, in today’s day in age almost everyone enjoys coffee to some extent. I wanted to target those people.

Goals

• Go viral
• Create shareable content
• Create relatable content
• Create content to make people laugh

Objectives

• To reach at least 500,000 views (if promoted)
• To get at least 20,000 shares (if promoted)
• To reach at least 300 views (if not promoted)
• To get at least 10 shares (if not promoted)

 

 

Outcomes

Overall, my post did not go viral and was not promoted to a BuzzFeed page. However, my goals were not terribly off for what I wanted to receive without going viral. I originally did not upload my video directly to Facebook and even when I did, it was not public at first which could have altered my view count.

I posted the above video with the caption, “Tag someone who needs this today 😴” and received about 113 views on YouTube when I posted. To experiment and compare, I uploaded the same video with the exact caption directly to my Facebook and got about 83 views at first, which would favor YouTube. However, when I re-posted on Monday with the caption, “Mondays am I right” I received even more views on Facebook and got my count up to 162 so the two were comparable but I think overall uploading directly to Facebook is more user-friendly (because of auto-play) and is the favored platform. I am also taking in account views I could have gotten on YouTube through Twitter.

I posted the video to Twitter as well but did not receive that much engagement (4 likes) and about 25 impressions which is very low for my Twitter.

Overall, between the two methods of video-posting, I got 275 views which is not too far off my goal of 300 for not being promoted. My content was not really shared as much as I had hoped on either platform which I think was just based on my following on Facebook. My Facebook is full of mostly “scrollers” and people who are viewing content but are not really interacting with it or posting it to their own pages. However, I did receive 24 total reactions over all of my video posts and had comments on all of them as well.

Successes? Failures?

I think I would have been more successful if I would have uploaded directly to Facebook in the first place to take advantage of their algorithm.

My call-to-action caption the first time I posted the video was not very successful. I had two people tag people in the comments, but most people disregarded the caption and I think I would have been better off with a funny or more relatable caption given the people who follow me on Facebook (who don’t like interacting).

My second caption, “Mondays am I right” worked well and also followed my Facebook aesthetic more closely (so people were less likely to suspect this was for a class) and I wish I would have done that kind of caption first just to see how successful it would have been by itself.

Twitter was not successful for this post. I would need to try to figure out a better way to get this content out into the Twitter-verse in a more transformative way.

I didn’t go viral and didn’t get shares, but I do think I succeeded in creating relatable and funny content. The timing of it was also pretty good based on the fact that finals are rapidly approaching and the demographic of my Facebook friends are mostly college students.

Potential for virality?

I would like to add an additional note that I think this post had the potential to go viral or do well had it been posted somewhere. The popular Snapchat Discover page, “Brother” actually posted a very similar video as their final snap on their discover page on December 2, 2017 on their “Swipe up to subscribe” page. Their video was just a cup of coffee being held over a sink with a coffee pot filling the cup until it overflowed.