Should Your Company Create Memes or Use Memes Online, On Social or In Email?

Even though you are here reading this article it’s likely that you have a position on the question “Should your company create memes?”. Some of you may be trying to validate your position by finding a good authoritative article that will support your view on it, you could actually not have a view either way and are trying to read more to figure out what you should think about Businesses using or creating memes online, or you are looking for ways that you can better use memes for your company, business or organization.   Let’s start off with this… “Should your business use memes?” The answer is YES and NO. Let’s be honest, you knew that answer was coming.   In this article we’ll share more information on memes, their usage, whether businesses & companies should use memes and what you can do regardless of your decision on if you use them or not.  

What is a Meme?

You know what a meme is. All that a meme really is, is a picture, video or GIF that has text on it and is funny and focused on a particular topic. That description sounds very boring, but it is what it is. Again, we all know what they are, but it just needed to be said as a primer for the rest of this article on meme usage for business.  

Why Do People Share Memes?

The only reason people share memes is to make others laugh and / or get attention. Creators like to create and if they are making memes it's to get people to laugh and pay more attention to their content.  

Why Would a Business Share Memes?

For the same reason! Businesses would share a meme in a different order though with the primary objective being to get attention. It’s true the laugh will come first, so they do want to and need to get people to laugh, they also want and need to get the attention for the meming to be worth it.  

Pros of Sharing Memes

There are good things that come from creating and sharing memes as a business. We’ve mentioned some already, but we’ll go into a little more delta on the good things that come from meming.  

Memes Get Attention

One of the main goals for businesses using memes is to generate awareness and attention. By doing it you will most definitely get this. So definitely a plus.

Customer Engagement

One form of attention is engagement. But this is much more significant. Customers and prospects are taking action by liking, sharing, and commenting.

Brand Awareness

While brand awareness isn’t going to be the strongest here, it will still come if the customer or prospect sees the meme coming from you. That connection, albeit passive, will still seed your brand in their mind.

 

Cons of Sharing Memes

And of course like everything there is also the bad that comes with sharing memes. What are they? We share a few of the reasons you might not want to share memes as a business.  

Offending Your Audience

We don’t like to consider ourselves soft, but the truth is that humor can offend people and today it feels like everything offends everyone. So it’s not a stretch to believe that if you share a meme someone will be offended. It’s a calculated risk you need to take for yourself.

Lack of Originality

Another truth is that some customers and prospects are highly cynical, and if you share a meme at face value just like everyone else you could come off as lazy and it not be funny. You just look boring and as if you’re trying too hard.

Inconsistent Branding

It’s nearly impossible to maintain brand consistency when sharing memes. The reason is that you must follow the format of the meme. You could attempt to tweak it, but that usually destroys the meme itself. And unless your brand already has a lot of variety in the type of content that is shared then you are probably going to have almost no brand standard for this content.

 

Should a Print Company Share Memes Online?

We threw this one in because we work with print service providers that market themselves and want to specifically address their particular situation on this. So should print companies share memes? While all of the same advice exists that we shared for all types of businesses, the fact is that most print businesses work with a lot of designers and marketers. This audience (Marketers & Designers) love memes. So the fact that they appreciate a good meme could be a reason to share them. But we aren’t actually advising that you do it. We’ll share our full thoughts on whether you should meme or not in the section section.   Ultimately the decision on whether or not your business creates memes or if your business shares memes is totally up to you. By considering the details that we’ve shared in this article you can better determine if business meme sharing is something that will benefit your company enough to validate doing it.   Yes you should share memes AND No you shouldn’t share memes. It just depends on what your goals are!   As a side note, something we wanted to point out is that most big businesses aren’t sharing memes that often. Any time you see a big trending meme we look to see what companies are doing it and they recently have all been small to medium-small size businesses. Take what you will from that, but we did think it was worth mentioning.

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