Background
My meme has to do with what most mothers, grandparents, and elders of this generation think of our phone use and how often we use/ are on our phones. Most mothers or parents in general believe that this technology generation, more specifically what many are calling the “millennials” use our phones way too much and too often. Most of this judgement comes from the comparison to what technologies older generations had access to growing up. Most mothers, including my own, blame everything on the fact that our generation is constantly on, or using our phones and social media. Our parents would much rather see us reading books, playing outside, or hanging out with our friends. From things as small as having a headache to as big as breaking your ankle, moms have the tendency to blame it on phone and social media usage. This meme was created to be a funny satire that plays on this idea that most people can either relate to via personal experience or seeing someone else experience it.
Marketing Plan
My marketing plan and objective for this meme was to eventually make it go viral through many likes, shares, interactions, impressions, etc. I chose to share my meme’s Imgur link to two social media platforms to try and create a buzz and a large viewing audience. I chose Twitter and Facebook as my main platforms. My objectives for this meme challenge were to get 50 impressions and 10 engagements on Twitter, while I expected to get about 20 likes on Facebook, and at least 100 views on Imgur. I set up a campaign on Twitter with a Twitter webcard that would help to promote my url and reach a bigger audience than the few followers that I have. Using a number of different resources to create and also promote my meme, I was able to set out a strategy of reaching my audience, more specifically those aged 14-25 who could most relate to this meme. I also set up a calendar in which I spread out which days I would be promoting the meme and how, to maximize the number of viewers and interactions I would get.
Twitter Post:
REALLY MOM!?🙄😒Check out this hilarious meme that moms won't understand #MomsBeLike #Millenials #FunnyMeme #NHsmc https://t.co/Y7AEcNpfWt
— Natiah K. Camillo (@NKCamillo) April 5, 2017
Analysis
As the campaign continued, I realized some key things that did and did not work in order to reach my goals. I didn’t receive as many likes on Facebook as I had intended mainly because I realized things about Facebook that aren’t necessarily the same for Twitter. Facebook is a place where people just scroll and don’t really feel the need to interact if something doesn’t catch a viewer’s eye. I realized that posting the Imgur url on Facebook rather than the whole meme wouldn’t get many people to actually be interested enough to click on it. On Facebook, if something is already eye-catching it will entice others to like or share it, but if not people tend to scroll past the content. On Twitter, I saw a lot more engagement and impressions than I was expecting. I think the use of hashtags on Twitter is more helpful than it is on Facebook. I should’ve focused on a more clever status to go along with my Facebook posts, instead of trying to include hashtags. Because I wasn’t very familiar with Twitter ads and campaigns, some of my tweets that contained my Imgur url weren’t a part of my Twitter campaign. This was a mistake of mine because they were only able to reach my followers and those who checked the hashtags used instead of being promoted to a wider audience. My impressions and engagements are slightly higher than what was reported on my Twitter campaign because I had multiple tweets with the Imgur url. I also realized during this challenge that towards the end I needed to be more active in posting my Imgur link than I had originally anticipated in my marketing plan.
Facebook Post:
Final Numbers
For my final results I received 327 views for my meme on Imgur, which definitely surpassed my expectations of 100 views. On Twitter I received 2,804 impressions, and 111 actual link clicks (not including the ones not a part of my Twitter campaign). Of those impressions and engagements 113 of them were organic and 459 of them were promoted as part of my twitter campaign. On Facebook I received 5 likes, and 2 shares even though I did not expect to receive any amount of shares at all.
Twitter Campaign Results:
Final Thoughts
Overall, this was a fun and interesting learning experience on how to make something go viral. There are a lot of steps, resources, etc. to consider when trying to make something viral on the internet. You must engage your viewers and create content that makes them actually want to click, share, and interact with it. More importantly, make sure your moms understand the impact of social media, and how useful our phones really are!