For the viral content challenge I decided on a meme of a funny baby’s reaction, captioned “when you find out the tooth fairy isn’t real.” I then used a mix of twitter, instagram and tags on Imgur to make the meme go “viral.”
Objective
I set out to get 1000 views on Imgur.
Meme
https://imgur.com/gallery/HM7WB
Twitter Webcard
This baby's face is priceless 😂😂 #NHsmc #MemeContest https://t.co/o6rfwAZREY
— Danny Fishbein (@DannyFishbein) November 12, 2017
Twitter Ads Engagement/Spend
https://imgur.com/gallery/ZjCib
Final Engagement/Analysis
In the end my Imgur meme ended up with 537 views. This means that the image did in fact go viral, however, I didn’t reach my goal of 1000 views. I unfortunately underestimated how hard it would be to get organic views through twitter. My goal was to get 1000 views partially using people’s retweets and likes to spread it through twitter. I thought that given Twitter’s meme sharing propensity, if one or two people retweeted it, then it would set off a chain reaction. Instead, I got no retweets on any of my Twitter posts, although I did get a few likes.
The strategy that seemed to work the best for getting Imgur views was tagging the post itself on Imgur with popular applicable hashtags. In the first day of my meme, I was able to get 300+ views due to sharing it with the tags “baby,” “aw,” “funny” and more. The other thing that seemed to work best for views was to tease out that people may be missing part of the image on the twitter webcard. The tweet I did that had the most link clicks, while other tweets just talking about the image being funny got similar impressions but less engagement.
Overall I think Imgur tags are the best way to make an Imgur meme go viral. Between that and some twitter teasers, you can get the most views.