Creating content that could potentially go viral is no easy feat. I knew what I was hoping to achieve, but not necessarily how to achieve it.

Objective(s)

• 500 Impressions on Imgur
• 500 Impressions on Twitter
• 20 Engagements on Twitter
• 4 Retweets on Twitter
• 20 Likes on Twitter
• 3 Shares on Facebook
• 5 Likes on Facebook

The dilemma of which meme could make the biggest statement in the digital world was long and complicated. After feedback in class and countless redesigns that were critiqued by friends and family, I decided on a meme that could engage with a common trend on social media…

The floor is lava was a familiar game to most millennials when they were younger, and I noticed it was being recreated in meme-form, replacing the word lava with words that are sarcastically difficult things in life or things you’re avoiding, like “the floor is a healthy relationship,” “the floor is unconditional love,” and “the floor is equality for all.” Usually what the word that replaces lava is something that would be ideal but is unlikely. Sometimes it can be tailored to whoever is not touching the floor, for instance there are memes that say “the floor is illegal immigrants,” and has Donald Trump’s face photo shopped on the body. I took this photo of my roommate, who is a college student, and tried to reference relatable impossibilities for college students. The three aspects in my caption are notoriously known to be difficult for college students to achieve all at once, so I thought this would be relatable to a younger audience. I then pushed this out on most of my social media accounts. On Twitter, I created a Webcard that linked to my meme on Imgur.

BRB, studying, sleeping and
socializing #not #thestruggleisreal #NHsmc https://t.co/BzJMP5Meun

— Sydney Trager (@sydneymtrager) November 8, 2017

I noticed the Webcard showed the most possibility of a user clicking on my photo and giving it views, so I promoted it using Twitter Ads, which ended up being extremely beneficial.

I am happy to proclaim that I was able to hit almost all of my objectives for this campaign. I had 4 total retweets on my tweets regarding my meme which was my goal. I also had 176 engagements on my tweets, which was definitely over my goal of 20 engagements. I had 3 shares and 6 likes on my Facebook post also. One of my objectives that I didn’t fully hit was getting likes on my tweets. I ended up getting 13 instead of my goal of 20. I believe this is because I tweeted too many times. The first two times I tweeted this image I got 5 likes, then 6 likes. The next few tweets got either 1 or no likes. I think my followers were sick of seeing the same content over and over again, and looking back on my campaign I agree I pushed this too hard, forcing anyone relative to me on twitter see this content too many times. Something that did work though, no surprise, was putting money behind one of my posts. With my promotion for my tweet I was able to make an engagement of 637 impressions with just five dollars. This was more than I could’ve imagined; I had hoped to get 500 impressions on Twitter overall, but I was able to get that with just one tweet. I think promoting my Webcard also gave viewers easy access to click on the image and be taken to Imgur, where I would receive more views for my photo. In total I got 553 views for my Imgur meme. This exceeded my goal of 500, and I’m very happy with the reach I was able to receive. I do believe that if I had merely posted the link to my Imgur in my tweets instead of both the link and the photo itself, I could have gotten more views, because they’d be forced to click on the site to see the content. Nevertheless, I am happy with the virality of the content I created.