SOCIAL
Does Posting Memes on Social Help to Increase Traffic to Your Website? [Study]
![Does Posting Memes on Social Help to Increase Traffic to Your Website? [Study] Does Posting Memes on Social Help to Increase Traffic to Your Website? [Study]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Does-Posting-Memes-on-Social-Help-to-Increase-Traffic-to.png)
Does posting memes help to increase traffic to your website?
This is a key question, which really relates to all kinds of engaging social media posts – because while these types of trending updates very clearly garner Likes and comments, do they actually benefit the stats that really matter to your business?
I mean, Likes and followers are great, but what you need is conversions, relative to what that means for your business. For SMT, we’re working to get as many people to read our posts as possible, and as you’ve likely noticed, we’ve recently been trying out memes as a way to boost engagement, and see what that gets us in this respect.
So what have we found? Here’s a quick overview of the initial results of our meme experiment.
First, a quick bit of background…
We’re always looking to try new things, and test out the latest trends and processes, and not just because it might help us generate more traffic and build community, but also, because that’s what we write about. If we’re going to write about it, we need to know and understand it as much as possible, in order to ensure that what we’re communicating is correct, and makes sense for our audience.
In this respect, we’re always testing new approaches, apps, tools, etc.
In terms of posting, last year, we tried out polls on Twitter and LinkedIn, and question posts on Facebook, to see if they would help drive more engagement. And they definitely did – these types of audience-prompting updates garnered a heap of Likes and comments. But when we cross-checked this against Google Analytics tracking, we didn’t see a big uptick in sessions or users visiting the site.
That’s not to say that these aren’t valuable, but they weren’t shifting the needle in any significant way on our key metrics. At the same time, too many polls can get annoying. In our experience, they’re an interesting tool to use, in moderation, but not a massive driver of our ultimate aims.
Yet, at the same time, our social traffic, like all platforms, tends to have ups and downs – and in a down period this year, we decided to try something new to freshen up the feed and give our audience something else to engage with, and maybe lighten the mood a little at the same time.
Enter memes
The inspiration in this instance came from SEMRush, who’ve also tested out memes as a means to boost engagement, and build community.
SEMRush’s experience saw them significantly increase their social engagement by posting timely, on-trend, niche memes. So we thought we’d give it a try, to see if that helps drive more interest in our articles.
The first step, of course, is creating relevant, engaging memes. Which is not always easy. Many of our memes never made it out of test phase, with some clearly failing when viewed in the templates.
Some that we’ve posted also haven’t connected in the way that we’d hoped.
But this is the game – if you’re going to post memes, you’re going to have hits and duds, and you just have to live with it. I imagine it’s the same as a comedian, some of the jokes work, some don’t. But ideally, more of them get a laugh than not.
Which, luckily, our memes have.
On average, the memes that we’ve posted are generating around 135 Likes on Facebook, which has helped them generate significantly more reach than our average post, while they’re also performing strong on both Twitter and LinkedIn.
And they’re fun. The way I view them is like the comic section of the traditional newspaper, a light-hearted moment between the news updates and informational elements.
The increased engagement obviously has some benefits in boosting algorithmic reach (if people engage with one of your posts, the algorithm is more likely to show them more), as well as building community around the SMT brand. But the key question is – ‘do they actually get more people clicking through to the site?’
Results
In our case, when comparing our overall social media performance against the previous 3 months before we started posting memes, we’ve seen a 12% increase in sessions from social, and a 16% increase in users.
That’s not a massive shift, but when you’re working with the ebbs and flows of referral traffic, as well as changes in analytics due to shifting data regulations, any increase is positive, and a double-digit jump is definitely worth the effort.
This is only around a month of data, so it’s not definitive, and there are also other factors to consider that could influence the results. But the numbers, thus far, suggest that it is worth sticking with – and as noted, it’s fun too, adding a little more relatability to our presence, as opposed just the latest news.
A few other notes:
- Some commenters are going to take your memes literally, no matter it is that you post. There’ll always be a couple of comments like ‘well, actually, the reality is that…’ Yes. We know. These are not meant to be literal, they’re a moment of light-heartedness in amongst our regular, marketing strategy-focused news updates.
- We’ve found that more general memes work better than trending ones. A couple of memes where we’ve tried to tap into news events, like the changes to Twitter verification, haven’t done as well as jokes about more common social media marketing experiences. This also, of course, relates to the memes themselves, and whether they’re actually funny, but in several examples, trending topics haven’t been as big a hit.
- Every meme is a bit of a risk. You’re trying to find commonalities with your audience, and some things that you might think are common might not resonate. You need to know your niche, and know your community, which takes some experimentation – and a lot of research (I’ve been writing about social media trends for eight years)
- One guy on LinkedIn keeps saying that he’s envious that we’re able to get these memes approved by management. For those that don’t know, SMT is an editorial team of two (2) people. Approval, in this sense, isn’t exactly a barrier.
- Does it take a long time to come up with them? Not really. We usually do them in batches or around 10 at a time, then schedule them out on different days/times across FB, Twitter and LinkedIn. We can make 10 or so in, maybe, a couple of hours, once every week and a half or so. Not a major commitment.
- We’re currently scheduling around one meme a day on each platform, again, taking that newspaper comic approach. Maybe we miss a day here and there, but that’s the general aim, as something to keep that engagement flowing, and keep the entertainment value up.
Look, it’s not necessarily a walk in the park to keep coming up with funny memes – and it may be that we run out of ideas at some stage and suddenly it becomes a lot more difficult. It’s also not for everyone. Coming up with a (relatively) clever joke that fits a meme template doesn’t always come easy, and there are days when you just don’t have it, no matter how hard you stare at the screen.
But for a minor time commitment, it does seem, at least at this stage, like this may be a good way to help engage your audience, which can also drive direct traffic benefits.
We’ll post another overview of our meme experience three months in.
SOCIAL
With outburst, Musk puts X’s survival in the balance

Even after Elon Musk gutted the staff by two-thirds, X, formerly Twitter, still has around 2,000 employees, and incurs substantial fixed costs like data servers and real estate
– Copyright POOL/AFP/File Leon Neal
Thomas URBAIN
Elon Musk’s verbal assault on advertisers who have shunned X (formerly Twitter) threatens to sink the social network further, with the tycoon warning of the platform’s demise, just one year after taking control.
“If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, go fuck yourself,” a visibly furious Musk told an interviewer in New York in front of an audience of the US business elite this week.
Musk was lashing out at the advertisers who had abandoned his platform after Media Matters, a left-wing media watchdog group, warned big companies that their ads were running aside posts by neo-Nazis.
Walmart on Friday was the latest to join the exodus, following the footsteps of IBM, Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Lionsgate and others.
The latest controversy broke earlier this month when Musk declared a tweet exposing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory as the “absolute truth.”
Musk apologized for his tweet, even taking a trip to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but on Wednesday he targeted his anger squarely at advertisers.
“It doesn’t take a social media expert to know that publicly and personally attacking the people in companies that pay X’s bills is not going to be good for business,” said analyst Jasmine Enberg of Insider Intelligence.
“Most advertiser boycotts on social media companies, including X, have been short lived. There’s a potential for this one to be longer,” she added.
Musk said the survival of X could be at stake.
“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” Musk said.
“Everybody will know” that advertisers were those responsible, he angrily added.
– Bankruptcy looms? –
Even before the latest bust up, Insider Intelligence was forecasting a 54-percent contraction in ad sales, to $1.9 billion this year.
“The advertising exodus at X could accelerate with Musk not playing nice in the sandbox,” said Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities.
According to data provided to AFP by market data analysis company SensorTower, as many as half of the social network’s top 100 US advertisers in October 2022 have already stopped spending altogether.
But by dropping X, “you are opening yourself up for competitors to step into your territory,” warned Kellis Landrum, co-founder of digital marketing agency True North Social.
Advertisers may also choose to stay for lack of an equivalent alternative.
Meta’s new Threads platform and other upstarts have yet to prove worthy adversaries for the time being, Landrum argued.
Analyst Enberg insisted that “X is not an essential platform for many advertisers, so withdrawing temporarily tends to be a pretty painless decision.”
Privately held, X does not release official figures, but all estimates point to a significant drop in the number of users.
SensorTower puts the annual fall at 45 percent for monthly users at the start of the fourth quarter, compared with the same period last year.
Added to this is the disengagement of dozens of highly followed accounts, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, JPMorgan Bank and Starbucks as well as many celebrities and media personalities that have stopped or reduced usage.
The corporate big names haven’t posted any content for weeks, when they used to be an everyday presence.
None of the dozen or so companies contacted by AFP responded to requests for comments.
In normal conditions, Twitter or X “was always much larger than its ad dollars,” said Enberg.
It was “an important place for brands and companies to connect with consumers and customers,” she said.
Even after Musk gutted the staff by two-thirds, X still has around 2,000 employees, and incurs substantial fixed costs like data servers and real estate.
Another threat is the colossal debt contracted by Musk for his acquisition, but now carried by X, which must meet a payment of over a billion dollars each year.
In his tense interview on Wednesday, Musk hinted that he would not come to the rescue if the coffers run dry, even if he has ample means to do so.
“If the company fails… it will fail because of an advertiser boycott and that will bankrupt the company,” Musk said.
SOCIAL
Walmart says it has stopped advertising on Elon Musk’s X platform

Walmart said Friday that it is scaling back its advertising on X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, because “we’ve found some other platforms better for reaching our customers.”
Walmart’s decision has been in the works for a while, according to a person familiar with the move. Yet it comes as X faces an advertiser exodus following billionaire owner Elon Musk’s support for an antisemitic post on the platform.
The retailer spends about $2.7 billion on advertising each year, according to MarketingDive. In an email to CBS MoneyWatch, X’s head of operations, Joe Benarroch, said Walmart still has a large presence on X. He added that the company stopped advertising on X in October, “so this is not a recent pausing.”
“Walmart has a wonderful community of more than a million people on X, and with a half a billion people on X, every year the platform experiences 15 billion impressions about the holidays alone with more than 50% of X users doing most or all of their shopping online,” Benarroch said.
Musk struck a defiant pose earlier this week at the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit, where he cursed out advertisers that had distanced themselves from X, telling them to “go f— yourself.” He also complained that companies are trying to “blackmail me with advertising” by cutting off their spending with the platform, and cautioned that the loss of big advertisers could “kill” X.
“And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company,” Musk added.
Dozens of advertisers — including players such as Apple, Coca Cola and Disney — have bailed on X since Musk tweeted that a post on the platform that claimed Jews fomented hatred against White people, echoing antisemitic stereotypes, was “the actual truth.”
Advertisers generally shy away from placing their brands and marketing messages next to controversial material, for fear that their image with consumers could get tarnished by incendiary content.
The loss of major advertisers could deprive X of up to $75 million in revenue, according to a New York Times report.
Musk said Wednesday his support of the antisemitic post was “one of the most foolish” he’d ever posted on X.
“I am quite sorry,” he said, adding “I should in retrospect not have replied to that particular post.”
SOCIAL
US Judge Blocks Montana’s Effort to Ban TikTok

TikTok has won another reprieve in the U.S., with a district judge blocking Montana’s effort to ban the app for all users in the state.
Back in May, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed legislation to ban TikTok outright from operating in the state, in order to protect residents from alleged intelligence gathering by China. There’s no definitive evidence that TikTok is, or has participated in such, but Gianforte opted to move to a full ban, going further than the government device bans issued in other regions.
As explained by Gianforte at the time:
“The Chinese Communist Party using TikTok to spy on Americans, violate their privacy, and collect their personal, private, and sensitive information is well-documented. Today, Montana takes the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.”
In response, a collection of TikTok users challenged the proposed ban, arguing that it violated their first amendment rights, which led to this latest court challenge, and District Court Judge Donald Molloy’s decision to stop Montana’s ban effort.
Montana’s TikTok ban had been set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024.
In issuing a preliminary injunction to stop Montana from imposing a full ban on the app, Molloy said that Montana’s legislation does indeed violate the Constitution and “oversteps state power.”
Molloy’s judgment is primarily centered on the fact that Montana has essentially sought to exercise foreign policy authority in enacting a TikTok ban, which is only enforceable by federal authorities. Molloy also noted that there was a “pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment” within Montana’s proposed legislation.
TikTok has welcomed the ruling, issuing a brief statement in response:
We are pleased the judge rejected this unconstitutional law and hundreds of thousands of Montanans can continue to express themselves, earn a living, and find community on TikTok.
— TikTok Policy (@TikTokPolicy) December 1, 2023
Montana attorney general, meanwhile, has said that it’s considering next steps to advance its proposed TikTok ban.
The news is a win for TikTok, though the Biden Administration is still weighing a full TikTok ban in the U.S., which may still happen, even though the process has been delayed by legal and legislative challenges.
As I’ve noted previously, my sense here would be that TikTok won’t be banned in the U.S. unless there’s a significant shift in U.S.-China relations, and that relationship is always somewhat tense, and volatile to a degree.
If the U.S. government has new reason to be concerned, it may well move to ban the app. But doing so would be a significant step, and would prompt further response from the C.C.P.
Which is why I suspect that the U.S. government won’t act, unless it feels that it has to. And right now, there’s no clear impetus to implement a ban, and stop a Chinese-owned company from operating in the region, purely because of its origin.
Which is the real crux of the issue here. A TikTok ban is not just banning a social media company, it’s blocking cross-border commerce, because the company is owned by China, which will remain the logic unless clear evidence arises that TikTok has been used as a vector for gathering information on U.S. citizens.
Banning a Chinese-owned app because it is Chinese-owned is a statement, beyond concerns about a social app, and the U.S. is right to tread carefully in considering how such a move might impact other industries.
So right now, TikTok is not going to be banned, in Montana, or anywhere else in the U.S. But that could still change, very quickly.
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