Phew, what a week. In case you don’t keep up with me on every social media platform (which shame on you if you don’t), I underwent a viral social media challenge to create and share my own meme. To the plain eye, this seems very easy and before I started I couldn’t agree more; how hard could be tweeting and promoting your content every day be? But I was quite wrong. It’s one thing to just put your content out there but it’s another to actual garner success while it’s out there. So let’s take a look at what exactly it took to try and achieve social media stardom through my social media marketing plan and community engagement:
Imgur meme:
We started by designing our own, original meme. Being a college student, I knew I needed a meme that would reach college students interests and struggles…#collegeproblems you know? I ultimately designed on a meme that every college student at one time or another could relate to: taking an exam and when comparing answers with your friends, realizing none of your answers are the same. Thus, inspiration for the meme below struck. The image screenshot also comes from one of my favorite viral videos.
Objective:
Once the meme was designed, my next step was determining how I would promote my content. When designing any social media marketing plan, an objective is vital; essentially an objective is why are you marketing and the result is something measurable. For my meme, I designed two objectives, as follows:
- To create a meme that reaches a minimum of 100 views on Imgur but aiming for at least 500 views
- Have at least three engagements per post, whether it be a like, comment, or retweet, but aiming for that number to increase as the week went on
At the end of the week, these would be the goals I wished to achieve with my meme, shedding light on whether or not my campaign was successful.
Twitter Webcard:
Following this, I produced a social media strategy, including an editorial calendar on how I would choose to promote my tweets. In this strategy, I also chose to create a Twitter Webcard Tweet. For those not super familiar with the concept, a Twitter Webcard allows a visual way for you to drive traffic to your website. In my case here, my website was the link to my Imgur photo.
Don't you just love when your day is going bad and then this happens #NHsmc #strugglebus #thestruggleisrealhttps://t.co/yNDpCQnO02
— Dana Matuson (@dana_matuson) April 6, 2017
As you can see, the Twitter Webcard is more graphic than me solely tweeting out a link to the Imgur, as it teases the audience in to my content.
Twitter Ads Engagement:
But creating a Twitter Webcard wasn’t the last step in my process. To create viral content, sometimes you need to pay for impressions…while they’re not the most organic, they absolutely help get your content out there to a bigger audience. Setting a limit of $5 for the week, I decided to start my Twitter Ad on Wednesday and have it run until Monday, spending $1 a day on promotion.
Analysis:
In all honesty, my campaign was not as successful as I had hoped, even though my meme reached 543 views and completed one of my objectives. One of the biggest problems I found was that my followers became almost bored with my content. When creating a social media marketing plan, you’re usually promoting a variety of content surrounding one topic. Because I was sharing one piece of content constantly, my followers lost interest and were not as engaging by the end of the week because it was nothing new. While I tried a few A/B testing with different captions and retweeting at different times of the night, I did not see my engagement to be spiking as I hoped.
When looking at Twitter Impressions, I saw my numbers for my Tweet Card were not as high as I had hoped either. My promoted tweet only received 308 organic impressions with 87 engagements, producing a 28.2 percent engagement rate. Combined with the paid Twitter ad, I received an additional 493 promoted impressions and 81 link clicks for a grand total of 801 impressions for the Tweet Card. While this was higher than some of my other content for the semester, it’s nothing spectacular, as I needed higher engagements to get the views I desired. In my social media marketing plan, I discussed I would analyze my engagement totals from the past 28 days before and after the campaign to see a growth. In that aspect, there was success, as I experienced a 4.6 percent engagement rate increase to my tweets, garnering 23.7K impressions for the period or 400 impressions per day.
I also found my Twitter Ad Engagement was somewhat of a bust as well. In the five days it ran, I only received 185 impressions, resulting in only 8 link clicks and a result rate of 4.10 percent…this was not what imagined when I started the campaign and this was disappointing. If I was to run another ad again, I think I would spend more time targeting my audience. For example, while I thought a keyword of birds would be the most successful (because of the birds in the image), it was actually college that proved most successful; ultimately, I put my eggs in the wrong basket (ironically).
Ultimately, I think my greatest success in promoting my meme came from Imgur. Because Imgur gives you the option of your sharing your content to their community, it created a larger network for my content to be seen. A few times during the week I would reshare my content to the community, changing up the hashtags slightly depending on what was trending, and it was through this I saw the greatest jumps in my views.
Overall, this assignment has taught me a lot about how much work and effort really goes into creating a successful social media marketing plan. While not everything went according to plan, I’m excited to carry this knowledge over into future endeavors and hopefully one day create a more successful viral content.