The White House now has an Official Story on Snapchat, after having joined the hugely popular video messaging app on Monday, January 11. The announcement was made on the Obama administration’s blog, by Joshua Miller, director of product management.
It’s actually not the first time that the U.S. president has found it essential to have a more active and authentic online presence, especially when it comes to social media websites.
Barack Obama’s professed objective has always been to get acquainted with as many American citizens as possible, in order to better address their needs and grievances.
The US president even has a Twitter account (@POTUS) with 5.8 million followers, an Instagram profile (boasting 2.6 million followers), as well as an official Facebook page, as part of his efforts to generate greater visibility and support for his projects and initiatives.
More recently, the White House has also joined Genius, a platform where users can publish annotations and interpretations of various texts, including song lyrics, news articles, poetry etc.
On this website, all of Obama’s State of the Union addresses were made available to the public, accompanied by commentary and anecdotes shared by other members of the White House staff.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that Snapchat, whose popularity has been growing in recent months, was also added to the mix.
After all, the app currently boasts more than 100 million active users, the vast of majority of them being under the age of 25. In fact, across the United States as many as 3 out of 5 smartphone owners between the age of 13 and 34 have been captivated by this service, whose appeal appears unfading.
Normally, Snapchat allows users to share temporary “snaps” (that can only be viewed once) and “stories” (available for 24 hours), created using photographs, videos, doodles and text captions.
Official Stories have also been introduced just for a select few public figures, so as to confirm that the particular account has been verified, and really does belong to that celebrity.
This security-enhanced feature was developed and launched so as to prevent others from creating fake profiles and disseminating inflammatory news or remarks.
Now, it appears that even the White House has jumped on the bandwagon, in an effort to reach out to the app’s ever-expanding audience, represented mostly by millennials and other members of the younger generation.
By using Snapchat’s Official Story service, the Obama administration will be able to give other platform users unprecedented insight into its projects, initiatives and day-to-day activities.
It remains to be seen if this newly introduced strategy meant to build a more prominent digital presence for the White House across non-traditional publishing platforms will turn out to be successful.
Apparently, starting from tomorrow, the account will begin posting behind-the-scenes footage, centered around the Barack Obama’s upcoming State of the Union address, which will take place on Tuesday, January 12, and will be the last of his second presidential mandate.
The images and clips will be entirely exclusive, appearing solely on this platform, without being distributed outside its limits. Those wishing to have access to such updates on Snapchat, should enter the term “WhiteHouse” in the app’s search box, and afterwards send out a friend request to that account.
Image Source: The White House
