What I Learned from 14 Days of Posting Memes

I never took memes seriously. Even after watching Doge explode in the crypto world, I thought they were dumb internet jokes.

Then I came across Jason Levin ?? on LinkedIn, and after binging his content, I noticed that smart marketers were consistently using memes as a top-of-funnel strategy.

This made me realize that I was the dumb one, not the memes.

So two weeks ago I decided to test these out with brand new Instagram accounts in two niches - sports and babies.

Why these? Because memes work best when you understand your audience's daily experiences - and I'm living both - watching a lot of sports and raising a baby.

Here's what became clear fast: Instagram and TikTok play by completely different rules.

I've had success on TikTok by blending business stories with pop culture, but Instagram users are primarily looking to be entertained and share content.

They're scrolling to find those "diamonds in the rough" - funny memes worth sending to friends. That's why shares, not watch time, are Instagram's holy grail metric.

The results shocked me.

My carefully crafted story-based videos are getting hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok but barely thousands on Instagram over the last 3 months.

Aside from one video that hit 600K on Instagram, all my six-figure views came from a bigger account who uploaded my video and added me as a collaborator.

Meanwhile my recent baby reels are consistently getting 3,000 views per post, while the sports account saw two posts reach 50,000 views.

So the math became obvious: why spend two hours making a video when I could create 10 high-performing memes in 20 minutes? .

Neither account is putting up massive numbers, but the efficiency is undeniable - especially considering how quickly we achieved this reach.

What I've learned is counterintuitive: sometimes the simplest, most shareable content strategy beats out complex, time-consuming content production.

It's not about dumbing things down - it's about understanding how people actually use these platforms and meeting them there.

The next phase?

Layering in more valuable based content to try and convert those views to followers, and then using the combo to see if I can use it as a launch pad for product ideas I have related to those niches.

Follow me here on LinkedIn Joe DiRico to watch the experiment unfold and reach out if you have any questions about organic content.