Students have found a new way to bring more people to their parties and events: social media.
Dance Marathon uses social media to promote events and even to get celebrities to come to the school, said Corinne Vincent, multimedia chair.
“We try to utilize social media like Facebook and Twitter,” she said. “Twitter gave us a way to reach out to students and update them on events and answer any questions if they have some.”
Vincent uses both to inform the school about events happening for both Dance Marathon and other student organizations. They also use Twitter for trivia Tuesdays, where the first person to respond gets a free reward, she said.
In order to get celebrities to come to their main event, Ziggython, Dance Marathon has coined a new way to get famous attention.
“We’ve had celebrities retweet us or say something about us,” Vincent said. “A lot of students are dedicated to Dance Marathon and know that Twitter is a great tool.”
Right now, they are trying to get Ellen DeGeneres to come to Ziggython, so they are tweeting and using the hash tag: #BGDMneedsEllen.
However, Dance Marathon isn’t the only student organization to use social media to promote events.
“We use Facebook to inform and promote events, our meetings and our initiatives to let people see what USG is about,” said Director of Marketing for the Undergraduate Student Government Michele Wysocki. “Twitter is more about shout outs and engaging with students. We use it a lot for contests and winning $25 gift cards.”
Wysocki said they use social media because anyone can relate to it.
“It’s a great tool to communicate with our generation,” she said. “We are always on our phone or computer. It seems to work for us to use.”
Student organizations aren’t the only things that use social media to promote events. It maybe more common for students to get invited to things like parties on Facebook or Twitter rather than face-to-face.
“A lot of times, I hear about a party that I’m invited to on Facebook and when my friends talk about it, it’s just assumed I read the post already,” said senior Amanda Wolfe. “It’s easier, I feel like it’s easier than a group message or to face to face invite people.”
Zack Holerook, vice president of marketing for UAO, is trying to increase their presence on social media and up their followers.
“We need to push it more, right now we announce events the day of but in the future we need to hold contests and quizzes to get people to tweet and hash tag us,” he said.
Holerook believes that social media is one key to success for student organization to get their voice out there.
“A lot of people use social media to get names and events out there, it’s free and has a high reach.”
