By Elyssa Phan, Staff Writer and Photographer
The presence of social media has drastically increased throughout the past five years within schools. From using Instagram hashtags to promote school events, Facebook pages to announce updates on spirit week, to even using it for casting votes for homecoming king and queen, social media has helped to make school activities easier to look over.
Many club meetings now have a slide with a list of all the social media platforms the club is on.
Social media allows students to bond and connect with each other outside of classroom walls. This allows more engagement between the club members with the club board than ever before, when club communication used to take place during a specific time frame on school days.
“[Social media] is our main connection to the members and Juniors of the school. We have a Facebook group page where we try to add as many people of the class of 2020 and that’s where they can get announcements and updates about the club,” said junior Shayla Tran, president of Junior Commission.
One aspect of school that social media plays a prominent role in is in school club functions. The most prominent apps used in clubs today are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Remind 101 and Snapchat, with Facebook being largely preferred.
With so many different new features on social media apps, such as the sticker question or rating bar on Instagram, there are so many ways to interact with members and get an insight to what they want. There is such a vast selection of platforms to use, depending on which aspect a club wants to focus on. For the more creative-based clubs, Instagram seems to be the preferred platform.
“Not only are Instagram posts more likely to make way into one’s feed, they are more interesting and memorable because it puts the image on focus,” said senior Sean Le, president of FV Blogger Society. “Being president of blogger’s society, visuals are a tremendously important part of our lives and Instagram captures that best. In addition, Instagram’s business features include stats you can view and see the number of interactions of each post.”
Flyers used to dominated the school halls, but now the usage of social media has eliminated that excess paper usage, while providing a much wider range of modes of interaction and more effective information distribution.
So how vital is having some sort of social media platform when running a club today?
“Fountain Valley High School, we have a lot of clubs… but like they kind of disband because they don’t publicize it a lot and people don’t know about it. So they don’t join. So social media is really important in advertising their club,” said sophomore Katy Nguyen, publicist of KIWIN’S club.
