As emerging social media managers, we have a responsibility to stay up-to-date on important internet trends and ideas – ideas which are often perpetuated with online memes and imagery. And as a creator, I often have to remind myself to have specific objectives in mind while creating a meme. These help me specify my goals and the content.

For the NHsmc Viral Content Challenge, I identified my objectives as:

• Gain at least 500 views on Imgur
• Reach the suggested number of Twitter users per my selected creatives on Twitter
• Keep production costs under $10

The meme itself was quite. . . unique. Check it out here! And the final view count was (drumroll please) 2,645 views!

I also created a Twitter Webcard to give a bite-sized sample of my meme to targeted viewers. It was surprisingly difficult to figure out the lingo attached to the Webcard creation, but was promoted successfully after a solid go. I did note the relatively large number of impressions (1,949) versus the small number of actual engagements (only six!).

The campaign function of Twitter Ads was utilized to create a separate campaign to target other viewers. So what if we sold out to the man a little bit? It’s important to know how to do! I blew through the $5 in a single day, which seemed to turn a relatively high profit.

So how did I do it?

Well, it wasn’t easy. This process was filled with much more trial and error than I expected. My initial attempts at simply submitting my meme on Imgur proved fruitless, with several posts (each with different tags) never surpassing 300 views. I conducted a comparison test by re-posting a pre-made, popular meme to see if the lack of engagement was content-based rather than strategy-based, but the same results appeared. Straightforward twitter posts linking to Imgur were similarly lacking in success.

I checked in with my marketing plan again, and realized that I was not including the breadth of platforms that I had originally aimed for. I looked to my meme’s content – which was slightly surreal, a bit weird, yet still wholesome – and decided to post to Reddit’s r/wholesomememes. This was the ticket – an engaging title on Reddit (“Flower Joe hopes you have an amazing spring”) prompted viewers to wonder who “Flower Joe” was, and included a call to action in the meme. Although this was the wrong platform to retweet, it didn’t seem to matter. I had 200 views in 10 minutes, 1,200 by the end of the day, and over 2,000 after three.

I believe that the high amount of subscribers on Reddit – coupled with a title/meme that fit the subreddit’s aesthetic – compelled many people to click on my meme. Once several comments had appeared, that increased it’s appeal. Overall, I hope to take away a valuable lesson about utilizing a variety of platforms – without targeting the right consumers on the right platform, engagements won’t just “flow” in.