How can a small business take 

2016 was a crazy year. It was a year of upsets and unlikely victories. Portugal won the Euros by defeating the favorites France, Leicester City won the Premier League for the first time in their 132-year long history, Donald J. Trump won the US presidential elections by edging past the crowd favorite Hillary Clinton, and here’s an interesting one – memes overtook Jesus in terms of online search popularity. Although the savior of humanity has regained his superiority in this meaningless online race since then (as he should, rightfully), the popularity of memes should not be ignored, especially if you’re the owner of a small business or an entrepreneur who uses social media for business.

We surf across multiple social media platforms in search of memes!

Image source: www.pixabay.com

Memes are among the most viral types of online content, quite literally, you could say. A good meme is like chickenpox –  (almost) everyone gets it, it affects you the most on first exposure, and it spreads easily. This makes memes the perfect tool for small businesses to gain popularity, increase engagement, and stay relevant among their target audiences. However, just like chickenpox, memes fade away or lose relevance quite easily, and do not have the same effect on everyone, all the time. To ensure maximum engagement on social media for business through memes, you’ll need to follow some best practices. Don’t worry, you won’t need a degree in Memeology (that’s a thing, by the way), or even a short course in using memes to gather and engage online followers. Just keep the following things in mind and you’ll be good to go:

Make it relevant

The rule of relevance, like it does to any other form of online content, applies to memes as well. Ensure that your meme is relevant to your audience, what’s happening right now, the point you’re trying to make, and your brand. Knowing your audience, and more importantly, knowing your meme, is a good way to evaluate the relevance of a meme for your brand and your purpose. Posting irrelevant memes, regardless of how funny you think they are, make you look clueless and out of touch. On the contrary, posting highly relevant and trending memes will endear your brand to your audience, and consistently posting relevant and hilarious memes on social media will drive traffic to your pages.

Make it original

You already know that it’s a bad idea to plagiarise or copy-paste online content. Although you can share memes created by someone else, you should ideally try to create your own memes for maximum impact. It’s fairly easy to create new memes using free online tools like Imgflip. Creating original memes that are linked to the message you’re delivering is better than using existing memes that offer little differentiation from regular social media accounts. Creating original memes does not necessarily mean creating a new image from scratch or coming up with an entirely new meme concept (although you can totally do that if you want to and are confident in your meme-making skills). You can use existing popular meme templates and add your own message in the correct format to serve your purpose.

Make it yours

When you create content to post on social media for business, there is little point in not incorporating your brand into the content. You’ll want your audience to know who created the meme. Add your brand logo, your twitter handle or your Facebook/Instagram profile link to the memes you’ve created, or better yet, create memes that directly speak about your brand or organization (without overdoing it, of course). Ensuring that you include your brand in your memes will help increase brand awareness.

If you’re an entrepreneur looking to increase customer engagement through social media for business, you’ll need as many tools as you can get to achieve this goal. You should consider making memes a part of your social media marketing strategy and an integral element of your digital marketing strategy. If you think you’re not very good at creating memes (or any kind of social media content for that matter), or simply don’t have the time to do so, there’s always a content marketing agency around that can help you.