The task of going viral may seem insurmountable. How can I both create content that people want to see and how can I get those very same people to see it? My objective for going viral was to make sure I not only completed the guidelines of the assignment, but to go above and beyond, and get many more eyeballs on my meme creation. I believe, with the power of twitter ads and reddit, that I was able to accomplish my goals. Here is my meme creation that I referenced in the last sentence – 

The idea came to me very organically. I was flipping through the channels of my television when Mean Girls came on. “Stop trying to make fetch happen, it’s not going to happen” says the eponymous mean girl herself, Regina George. So I thought to myself, “who else is trying to make something happen?” My mind instantly jumped Jay-Z and his new Tidal venture. As an avid rap fan, I needed to listen to Kanye West’s new album, The Life of Pablo, as soon as it came out. So I reluctantly downloaded the Tidal music player, and as soon as #TLOP became widely available I got rid of it like the plague. After using it for a month I can understand the backlash against Tidal: it does nothing new or even well for that matter. So in my mind I was able to imagine Regina George telling Jay-Z to stop trying to make Tidal happen and then bam, meme creation.

So I got the content part down, but the question still remained – how was I going to get everyone to see it? With a modest Twitter following of only 63, I knew I would need Twitter Ads to get the engagement on this tweet – https://twitter.com/SyracuseJeff/status/717743812995649536

After I signed up for an account, and creating my marketing plan I realized that I only created a tweet with a picture and not a Twitter Webcard. So this mistake on my part presented me with a new challenge, how could I also get the views I wanted on Imgur. Fortunately for me I have a deep knowledge of Reddit that only comes from years of lurking. Knowing that this meme may be able to well in the Advice Animals and HipHopHead Subreddits, I keenly placed it there during peak Redditing hours. This worked as my Imgur views were on pace or even greater than my Twitter impressions.

So, as it is shown in the Twitter Analytics page, I was far able to surpass the 30 engagement threshold needed for this assignment. Both of these images are interesting to analyze. The Imgur stats are interesting, if not a little hard to decipher. I’m not entirely sure what direct views are since I only promoted the image via Reddit. As so far as the Twitter analytics went, I am actually surprised I got so many organic engagements. I have a small sized following so they must have done a nice job to get the word out. My tweet was retweeted by some bigger sized accounts, some with upwards of 2,000 followers, but that didn’t seem to drive many engagements at all.

If I’ve learned anything from this assignment it’s that driving engagements isn’t too hard on a tweet. Going from around 25 engagements per tweet for over 400 just through a 5 dollar twitter advertising budget and a little elbow grease is something that feels good, and also something that I can replicate in the future. Virality may have seemed like fetch at the beginning, something that wasn’t going to happen, but I guess Regina George was wrong.