House of the Dragon has exploded on HBO Max, reviving the Game of Thrones franchise after mixed reviews of the end of the original series. With millions of viewers tuning in to this gripping new storyline, there are plenty of “meme-able” moments and scenes that we had to share on our Tiktok page.
Tiktok has been an extremely powerful vehicle for reaching a large user base with the help of the new photo slideshow or “carousel” feature that was added in October of 2022. Mirroring the carousel feature that Instagram added a few years back, Tiktok’s Photo Mode allows users to upload a series of images with all of the editing and sound options of a normal Tiktok video. People can compile a series of photos, choose a background sound or popular song, and the slideshow will automatically play for the viewer once its posted. We’ve seen this feature explode in popularity, as accounts mainly use it to share memes, aesthetic Pinterest wallpapers, and personal photographs.
The first notable viral moment stemming from Tiktok’s new feature is from artist Kanye West’s song “Violent Crimes”. Users and meme pages created wholesome “storyboards” using pictures of cute monkeys and relatable content surrounding people’s life activities. In September 2022, this trend became a viral sensation, bringing in millions of views per post. The use of the Photo Mode feature has expanded into new trends and memes, particularly wizard memes (story-telling relating to smoking cannabis and partying with the boys), as well as meme “dumps” where there are up to 35 miscellaneous Twitters posts or funny images all tucked into one post.
For the House of the Dragon U.S. page, we decided to see how this new feature would work out for our own content. We created and curated some memes relating to the first few episodes of the series, piecing them together using Tikok’s Photo Mode. We found a popular slowed down reverberated sound that had around 40,000 videos posted to it at the time of the post. On our team’s own For You pages there were numerous viral posts using similar sounds and using storyboard formats for memes.
Our first post amassed 1.2 million views, with 55,000 likes and 2,708 favorites. On that carousel and the subsequent carousels to follow, we featured memes poking fun at Ser Criston Cole, Rhaenyra Targaryen, Alicent Hightower, and of course Larys Strong (for obvious reasons). It seems that the allure of the meme slideshows is the anticipation of what the next image could be, whether it relates to the previous one in a storyboard format or not. Using trending sounds are particularly important for these posts, especially if the user is swiping through the carousel.
A recent article from Mashable argues that this new feature is rapidly replacing original content, as accounts can now use recycled memes and images from their camera roll, throw a sound over it, and create a following relatively easily. This suggests that in Tiktok’s efforts to be more like Instagram (the same way Instagram adopts features from other social media apps), they stray away from being a niche competitor in the market which offers the user nothing unique or original. This hypothesis can be seen with our content strategy approach on the House of the Dragon U.S. page, where a collection of memes taken from many sources around the internet can go viral with less emphasis on original content.
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