Most Popular Memes Trending on Social Right Now (Updated Monthly)
While it’s important to share product releases, sale reminders and more, memes are an incredibly effective way to gain engagement on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Twitter.
Not only do they provide fun and fast entertainment for your audience, but they also help develop your brand’s voice, identity and infuse personality into your social profiles. Memes can be an impactful way to engage your community — when done right.
In this blog, we discuss:
- August 2023 trending memes.
- What are memes?
- How to find trending memes.
- Should brands share memes?
- Monthly trending memes.
Trending Memes: August 2023
Here are some popular memes that are trending across a variety of social accounts this month.
Whether you want to incorporate these into your brand strategy or simply learn what’s new and popular, here are popular memes trending in August.
'Barbenheimer' Meme
Barbie and Oppenheimer are two movies taking the box office — and the internet by storm. So many plays on ‘Barbenheimer’ have reached our social feeds, from imagined posters combining visuals from the two films to memes pointing out the contrast between the two films.
Eras and Reputation Tour
Along with Barbie, another topical subject that’s perfect for memes is anything that comments on the success of Taylor Swift or Beyonce's recent tours — bonus points for commentary on how their combined tours have stimulated the economy.
Dinner at Jimmy Kimmels'
Who knew a dinner party could go viral like this? This slew of celebrities at Jimmy Kimmel’s house has resulted in memes poking fun at the sheer number of celebrities in a casual environment, among other jokes.
Brain Scan
There have been many variations of ‘brain’ memes that have trended, from galaxy brain trend to this. This trend is easy to customize for nearly any brand — simply speak to something that figuratively, makes your brain ‘light up’.
What Are Memes?
So, what are memes, exactly? Memes are often funny copy, images, videos or other online content that usually spread rapidly and are reproduced by other users in the form of jokes or incorporating the original joke or visual in online content.
Why Are They Called Memes, and What Makes a Meme?
Memes earned their name from Richard Dawkins, who used the term in his book 'The Selfish Gene'. The word ‘meme’ is derived from the Greek word ‘mimema’, which means ‘imitated’ — this name fits memes perfectly, as they transcend a joke when they become duplicated, edited and widely shared.
If a meme is something used and widely spread, is a GIF a meme? Not necessarily — GIFs could be derived from a popular meme, but since users can’t edit GIFs for reproduction in the same way they can text and video, GIFs aren’t the exact same as memes.
How To Find Trending Memes
Luckily for social marketers, there are many ways to find trending memes — sharing outdated memes (even by 1-2 months) can make your brand or social team appear out of touch or out of the loop. To prevent this, your social media marketing strategy should leave room for agility so your team doesn’t rely on pre-scheduled memes that could become irrelevant quickly.
To find trending memes, social marketers should:
- Follow a variety of meme accounts. Popular accounts include @daquan and @epicfunnypage. Some of the most popular aggregate meme accounts contain profane names, so take a peek around Instagram and follow a few accounts that share a variety of funny content.
- Bookmark blogs like this that are regularly updated with round-ups of the latest memes.
- Utilize Reddit for marketing — Reddit is a trove of funny, humorous content and trending memes that are often shared there before anywhere else.
Should Brands Share Memes?
Overall, depending on your industry and audience, entertaining content like memes can help drive conversions and engagement — but this isn’t always the case. One way to discover if memes would resonate with your audience include creating buyer personas. Buyer personas involve diving into existing and target audience demographics, researching their likes, dislikes, online habits and more to help inform your content marketing strategy. For example, if you plan to target Gen Z, including memes is likely beneficial for your content mix. Insider Intelligence reports Gen Z is more likely to stay on platforms that embrace memes, illustrated by just 2.4% of Gen Z planning to leave Twitter (or X), compared to 9% of users from other generations.
Leverage Engagement With Memes — And Dash Hudson
Dash Hudson helps your visual content strategy from scheduling to measurement. The Scheduler tool lets you share content to a variety of social channels that your entire team can review — Vision is an AI-powered tool that informs you which visual content has the best chance to perform well. This is a powerful tool to share the best memes that will engage your audience.
FAQs
Why are memes so popular?
Memes are so popular because they’re a form of social entertainment that’s quick and easy to read and digest. Entertaining audiences is paramount to attracting them and engaging on social media, and memes are one of the most common ways to do this, that also let social marketers express their brand’s humor and personality.
How to make a meme popular?
It can be challenging to make an original meme popular, as the nature of memes are quite organic.
However, there are some tips you can use to increase your chances of creating popular content:
- Dive into competitive insights and use custom reporting to discover what memes competitors share and set benchmarks for your own meme performance.
- Revisit your buyer personas biannually or annually in case the content your target demographic engages with has changed.
- Take time weekly to explore what memes are taking over TikTok and Instagram — even if you don’t incorporate these into your content schedule, it’s helpful to know what type of humor and jokes resonate with a wide range of users.
What is the most popular meme ever?
When it comes to determining the most popular meme, this is a little tricky as the platforms and type of memes commonly shared have changed over time.
Some of the most popular memes of all time include:
