Sometimes, just sometimes a content piece comes along which gets into the sweet spot: with the users and with Facebook’s ongoing experiments. A meme which was born out of the collective frustration of the team in planning a group trip, went crazy viral smashing all our previous image post benchmarks.
The Results – First Week
The meme was part of our experiment on Facebook, an innocent little 3pm post on a Tuesday, had gathered more than 110,000 comments by Friday.
- Reached 20 million News-feeds
(that’s like reaching the entire population of Netherlands, and then some!) - Received more than 120,000 comments
- Added 16,000 new fans to our Facebook page
- Shared by more than 100,000 users
- Smashed the previous benchmark of image post virality
- Featured by 9gag! with 200+ comments
- All organic and with-in the first week!
Learnings
Content Marketing to me is like operating a movie studio, make ten movies hoping that two would be crazy successful. Some stuff works, some just dies a quick death, and what works becomes a best practice :)
The following four buckets help in planning topics for virality
- Useful: Is it providing a solution or solving a pain point?
- Inspirational: Does it inspire users to take action?
- Topical: Good old News-jacking: Breaking News + Brand DNA. Example, and another example :)
- Celebrate nuances: The little things, the stuff we don’t say, tiny part of our users’ lives
Easy to guess which bucket this meme fell into :)
“Do ten experiments, two may work, just like movie studios”
Shamelessly Plagiarised
Got update from friends about the same meme being shamelessly copied and passed on as their own, on Facebook and Instagram. Re-posting the content is cool, give credit and I’ll understand, but when you erase our logo and put yours shamelessly, that is downright cheap. Our videos have been copy pasted before but not like this.
- Facebook: On Laughing Colors Facebook Page: Take a look, conveniently removed our logo and added their own, got 90k likes and 14k shares at the time of writing this.
- Instagram: On some ‘Realshit.Gyan’ account, take a look. Same shit, different account. This one had received 10k likes and 1600 comments at the time of this post
UPDATE: The said posts were removed on request :)