My original campaign objective was more of a campaign purpose. I wrote that this meme is being marketed because it symbolizes the feeling many graduating seniors have, so it has the potential to reach a large audience. I realize now after weeks of learning about campaign objectives in my public relations courses, that a campaign objective is meant to be something measurable. My edited and updated campaign objective is to earn at least 30 engagements on my meme because it is then classified as “excellent content.”
I created a meme that summed up the essence of what it feels like to be a senior overwhelmed with the academic and social stresses of school,with the knowledge that graduation is approaching.
I initially experienced technical difficulties with Twitter ads, so I tweeted out my meme without a Twitter ad Webcard and only tweeted out my imgur image link along with a caption. The first tweet received decent engagement with 2 retweets and 4 likes. I was finally able to get access to Twitter ads a couple of days after the start of the campaign. I wanted to continue the momentum of my first tweet, so I promoted it with Twitter ads.
When you're dealing with that #senioritis struggle #MondayMood #NHsmc https://t.co/hWsjy1MynE
— Tatyana Laird (@TatyLaird) April 4, 2016
I earned 39 engagements on this Twitter Webcard. I only had a total budget of $5.00 so I tried to be as strategic as possible with targeting certain locations, demographics, interests and keywords. I also had automatic bid turned on. I wanted to reach a large, global audience, so I targeted the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. I chose to target these locations because they have large populations of English speakers who are living in the same western culture, so these audiences may relate to the meme. I targeted users interested in education, specifically college life and graduate school, comedy, and the life stage specific to college students. In hindsight, I realize I should’ve also targeted high school students because seniors in high school could also have a connection to the subject matter of the meme. Including this audience could’ve widened my reach and increased my engagement. I also did not target my promotion to specific Twitter users or followers. I learned too late that this could’ve significantly increased my number of engagements.
Although I started off with issues, I think it was interesting learning what type of content goes viral and how to use Twitter ads to increase the chances of content going viral. My goal was to gain 5 retweets and 10 likes, and I received about half of each of those. Overall, I am surprised at the amount of engagement and Imgur views I received. It was much higher than I anticipated or thought possible. I now have the knowledge and experience from my mistakes to exceed this in the future.