I’m a communications major.
Social media is inherently part of my degree.
Social media is also almost always part of my jobs and internships.
So it was no surprise when I was told part of my job as the STP communications intern is to update and manage the Summer Training Project social media accounts.
Pause for a plug.
Here are the links for our social media sites! Check ‘em out! Like or follow!
https://www.facebook.com/comstp
Moving on.
As some of you may know, hashtags (#) are becoming a big deal on every social site. What started as a Twitter feature is now a substantial part of other sites, including Facebook and Instagram. That’s important to know, because those are the main sites our students are posting to this summer.
Although it’s easy to get too caught up in technology and sucked into social media in an unhealthy way, there are good and helpful things about these online tools. One example is the hashtag.
If you search a hashtag on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you can see every picture, video and status that has been posted with that particular hashtag. The feed that comes up is a compilation of everyone’s posts. No longer do people need to search high and low for posts related to topics of interest. The hashtag does it for you.
In an effort to use this convenient feature, we have established a hashtag for our students at Project this summer.
#stp14convinced
This is the hashtag for STP 2014. Go ahead, look it up! Every few days I search the hashtag and it’s always fun to see what students are posting. I’ve seen everything from encouraging Facebook statuses about things people are learning about Jesus to artistic pictures on Instagram of the many adventures students have during their free days.
A lot of the students here talk about how hard it is to keep up with all their friends and family back home. Social media is obviously not an ideal or adequate replacement for a phone call, but it can help supplement since students are able to quickly post several updates throughout the day.
I hope all the friends and family back home find this source helpful! The students at Project enjoy using the hashtag to find each other’s posts and look back over the weeks to see the fun that has happened in South Carolina, but we also want this to be serving those who aren’t at STP.
Dozens of posts come in every day, so keep checking in!