Whether or not a meme is close to the objective truth doesn’t have much of an impact on its popularity, Psychology Today stresses. What matters the most, instead, are the emotions that you feel upon seeing an image or video.
Internet content that forces you to feel stronger emotions, whether positive or negative, tends to be shared and reshared more frequently than memes that cause weaker emotions.
So, content that is extremely funny, makes you angry, or disgusts you tends to be the most viral.
In the meantime, the BBC explains that the most viral and beloved memes tend to focus on the things that are very recent in public memory and important to many people.
“Viral memes usually appeal to the most common denominator. So you don't have to necessarily be embedded in internet subculture to understand what it's saying. And the final thing I think is, it's the most basic thing but it's very hard to replicate, is that it should be fun to look at, and fun to share,” says Idil Galip, a doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and founder of the Meme Studies Research Network.
Memes are meant to be shared, reshared, and iterated upon, over and over again. Ideas only ever become memes when they are shared and replicated. And it is unavoidable that meme-focused communities look to each other for inspiration.
“Memes are the largest art movement in human history and they're here to stay. The sheer volume of artists and total works of art outranks graffiti and the Renaissance by an absurdly large margin. Memes are easy to make, but have become a new medium of communication that's capable of displaying emotion in completely new ways,” Chris Tweten, the founder of ‘Things That Make You Go Hmmm,’ told Bored Panda during an earlier interview.
The ‘Things That Make You Go Hmmm’ page has been around on Facebook since early 2018. Over the past 8+ years, the founder and curator of the project, Tweten, has grown a following of 337k followers and counting.
During a previous interview with us, he opened up about the story behind the page, as well as his own relationship with memes and social media.
“The story behind that page is actually quite interesting: I used to scale meme pages on FB and sell them. There was a time when I lived solely off of meme revenue!" Tweten, the founder, opened up to us.
"I ran that page solo, sourcing content from Reddit and Facebook groups. I'm a Canadian growth marketer who owns an agency called ‘SpacebarCollective’ that also specialized in growth hacking from 2014 to 2018,” he shared with us earlier.
“Facebook was a channel that was largely written off as a pay-to-win platform, but I found massive algorithmic exploits that allowed me to grow pages by 10k to 50k likes per month,” he said.
“The strategy hinged on using predictive analytics to determine which posts would get 100k+ impressions based on their first 10 minutes of engagement,” Tweten said, sharing with us that he had found an in-depth way to understand how the social network worked back then.
“Knowing exploits like this have a limited window of time when they actually work (before Facebook notices), I looked to Reddit to find communities with content that was available in high volume and where they were underserved on Facebook.”
