The Meme That Smashed Benchmarks

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”

Aashish

Tweet me up at @aashishc or LinkedIn if you want to see me in a suit! (click-bait, no suit)