Objectives
I began my campaign with a few main goals beyond just making my meme go viral. I came up with some hard numbers that I wanted to reach. The set numbers allowed my success to be more easily measured. My objectives were:
- Acquire at least 500 views on Imgur
- Achieve at least 1,000 impressions/interactions with meme on Twitter
Results
Through implementing my marking plan, I was able to reach my objectives. I acquired 824 views on Imgur so far and 1099 impressions on my main tweet that I promoted using the twitter card.
Strategy (What worked and didn’t work)
I began my campaign by uploading my meme to Imgur on April 3rd. One of the things that really helped me garner views on my Imgur post was the use of hashtags. They really do work. I used very popular hashtags that a lot of people would use to find pictures. For example, my meme was about pizza rolls and had a baby in it so I used popular tags like #Food, #Baby, #Pizza, and #College. These are all immensly popular hashtags that are searched by users and it drove a lot of traffic to my picture early on. Before I even put out a tweet I had over 500 views.
It was a very difficult to find the right audience. My post was about pizza rolls and in a way can relate to alot of different people, whether it be college students who used to experience this, younger kids on social media who are experiencing it now as adults who maybe have children of their own. Hoeever, while this is a good thing, it made it difficult to narrowly tailor my message and campoang to a specific audience and gorup of people. That is why I used a wide variety of hastags to drive all kinds of viewers to my content.
With that being said, Twitter was the one area where I wish I could have excelled a little more in. One day after uploading my meme to Imgur, I created a website twitter card (shown below) with a link to my imgur picture. I tweeted it out to try and funnell an even larger audience to my meme.
If this wasn't you as a child, you are lying…https://t.co/LQNHBnB2aX
— Matt Reil (@MattReil21) April 5, 2017
I gained some engagement early on with five retweets and five favorites within the first hour, but it didn’t lead to that many impressions. More importantly, it didn’t lead to that many clicks on the card, meaning not a lot of people clicked on the image to take them to the Imgur content. Maybe I could have positioned the card picture a little better to make users need to click on the card to see and get the full story of the meme. I tried to do that by cutting off the top set of words a bit so that audience members would click on it. It didn’t work as nicely as I would have hoped. I gained more than 400 impressions from promoting my tweet. However, you can see from the promotion results below that it only led to 41 clicks into my content.
That was less than what I wanted or expected. There were 80 total clicks into my web card if you count organic and promoted all-together. That isn’t terrible, but it was not what I was looking for even though I reached my impressions goal. Over 1,000 people saw it, yet less than 10% clicked on it. Other than the picture itself, the tweet attached to the card could have been more creative. If I could do it over, I would probably put something else.
Conclusion
Overall, I was pretty happy with my campaign and meme. I thought I did a good job of driving views to my content with hashtags on Imgur. Furthermore, I could have done a better job using twitter to my benefit. If I had to grade it myself, I would say compared to some other content, I feel my meme went viral or “semi-viral.” Yes, I am now coining “semi-viral” as a term.