Since I have come to school five years ago, the Royal Purple student newspaper, which is a large part of who I am, has made incredible strides on social media accounts such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
When I first came on as a staff writer for the paper, the website and Facebook page were very primitive. The paper didn’t have an Instagram, but both the Royal Purple news and Twitter accounts did have a large following. We continued to slowly grow the online presence by posting stories, live-tweeting sports events and the Whitewater Student Government races and much, much more. In the past two years, we have created an Instagram account to share some of our top photos and graphics that further spread the message.
Two years ago, as a staff, we decided to add two more positions, multi-media and social media editor. Unfortunately, we currently don’t have a social media editor who would make YouTube videos that we would share on our Twitter and Facebook accounts about upcoming stories, video coverage of events that we had been covering.
Our social media manager is responsible for promoting all of our stories that get uploaded to our website and using language to entice people to click on our site and read our content.
The one thing that we really do not promote as much as we should is our Twitter. Besides live-tweeting some events, both the news and sports accounts could have a chance to reach a completely different following on that app by tweeting out our stories like many top news organizations do.
The social media world is an ever-changing place, and as we as people and organizations strive to keep up with it, it changes again. It can be frustrating and rewarding but is something that is here to stay.
