On any given weeknight, students open tabs to Twitter and Facebook between homework assignments. Members of Players have changed their profile picture to an onstage photo of their upcoming show. Superfans encourage peers to come to the volleyball game this Monday night. The soccer team Twitter begins to fill up feeds with a play-by-play of the game. “Pravder just scored maybe the best goal I’ve ever seen. It was incredible. Left footed half volley into the top corner,” reports live-tweeter Ben Cion ’14.
Staples organizations of all kinds are using social media to keep their fellow students in the loop and publicize their upcoming events.
“We’re encouraged to promote our productions to all of our Facebook friends by changing our profile pictures to the Players show,” Staples Player Kelly Gore ’14 said. “It’s supposed to advertise the show and get people to mark their calendars.”
Players are known for changing their profile pictures to promotional posters and pictures from rehearsals to get students hyped up for their upcoming shows.
“We use [profile pictures] to promote the show and really blast people with information, and the players promotional tactic is mainly to overwhelm and excite at the same time, which really works in getting tickets sold quickly,” Staples Player Nathan Francis ’14 added. “Everything helps when it comes to getting a house sold out.”
According to Katelyn Farnen ’14, this tactic is proven to work. “The more people that post pictures from the show and change their profile pictures in a given day, the more ticket sales will happen in that day,” she adds.
And Players aren’t the only ones filling up the newsfeeds of Staples students.
Staples sports teams are also participating in the trend of using social media to promote their games and to rally fans.
“The [soccer] team used [the Twitter account] to make the Staples soccer brand more accessible to alumni and parents who didn’t have as much of an opportunity to watch the games,” said Ben Cion ’14 who live-tweeted all of the games while giving his own personal insight.
Nick Vega, president of Wreckers in Tune, finds that utilizing social media, which teens use so frequently, is a good way to make sure that both club members and followers are informed.
“It is already hard enough to get a group of high schoolers to be at one place, after school hours, and on time, so having this source of media is huge for us,” he said.
Certain teachers are getting in on the Twitter game as well, using it as an extra tool for learning. A.P. U.S. Government teacher Suzanne Kammerman supplements her class by sending relevant articles and links via Twitter.
“The more aware they are of current events, the more the course starts to make sense to them. It is not a required component of the class; however, my experience has been that students who do read the articles tend to develop a greater understanding of the material we are covering in class,” Kammerman said. “I hope that it keeps the students interested; that is my intention!”
