Social Media and Sororities – How to Become the Best Organization on Campus Through Your Online Presence

Oh, greek life. The home that you choose with a bunch of strangers who you learn to call family. Portraying your sorority as an organization with strong values, competent alumni and a positive overall image can be difficult. It is hard to avoid sorority girls on social media, they have mastered the perfect angle, Pinterest pose and lighting to even think about posting a photo. 

Typical Sorority Picture

I currently run the the social media for my sorority, here are some tricks and tips that I use that help us showcase our overall image as kind, passionate and unique. 

Be Consistent

Whether you’re posting on Facebook, Instagram or updating your website, ensuring that your posting schedule is consistent is important. It reminds people that your organization is active and engaged in the community around campuses and in the city.

Pay to Promote

Engagements on your posts can substantially grow by just $10 being thrown into a Facebook or Instagram post. This is especially important for reach during the recruitment period of the sorority. Ensuring that your payed promotions are targeted and visually pleasing can gain you your future sisters. 

Instagram is the place to be

It is all about the feed and the visual appeal of your colour scheme and tone. If you have mix matched photos, you are not going to have a massive amount of visitors to your page. 

Without a doubt, in Ottawa greek life the majority of connections that are made are through Instagram. Ensuring that you’re commenting on fraternities social media posts is essential to the relevance of your organization. A simple “congratulations!” for a successful philanthropy event could be the first step to your next mixer. 

Example of a great sorority Instagram feed

What to Highlight 

1. Each of your sisters are successful and smart in their own way. Ensuring that you highlight their accomplishments whether it be academic, career wise or other, showcasing the best of your organization will help you recruit. 
2. Impress the world with your philanthropy efforts. Not only is it a good thing to promote how much money you’ve raised at certain events, but it also helps break down stereotypes that all sororities do is party. 
3. Your New Member class can define you. The pledges in your organization are an image of your future as an organization. Ensuring that you show the size of the pledge class and highlight their skills is important. 
4. Sisterhood, sisterhood, sisterhood. Show the world what is so great about your organization by allowing girls to answer questions about the organization or make short videos about what is so great about being a part of the organization. 
5. Posting about your events dictates your relevance on campus. Ensuring that in every Facebook group, your event graphics are shared and spread is important. 

Those are my favourite tips to making sure your sorority is on their social media game! What kind of tips do you use to promote an organization that you’re a part of?

Facebook: Looking to boost the reputation of your Greek organization on campus? Social Media can bring a whole new reputation to your letters! Check out my tips for successful marketing here:

Twitter: It can be hard to navigate what a greek organization is all about, their social media can help you discover the best of any organization! Read about it here:

Tik Tok is the Funniest (and Weirdest) Place on the Internet

When I first started using social media in middle school, Tik Tok was just a song by Ke$ha that was played at every dance. Now, it’s better known as a video sharing app that has 1.5 billion users around the world.

Tik Tok Logo

The Rise of Tik Tok

Part of me is still mourning the loss of Vine, which was an application where people could share 6-second videos showcasing humorous things that their friends were doing. Vine has shut down a few years ago kinds of out of nowhere and for a while, there was nothing even comparable. Who wouldn’t love to consume content quickly that lifts their mood with humour? 

Then musicall.y came around, which was primarily for people to lip-sync and do dances with their friends. This concept never appealed to me, it was weird to think that there was an entire application dedicated to fake singing. To each their own of course, but it wasn’t the way that I wanted to spend my time. 

In September 2017, Tik Tok launched worldwide and on 23 January 2018, it ranked #1 in free mobile app downloads. It found a middle ground between musicall.y and Vine by making an application where you can choose your sound to use or make one yourself, and your videos could be up to 30 seconds long. It had the best of both worlds and more, with live streams and the ability to easily grow your following with the use of the “For You” page and an algorithm that promotes content that is both diverse and in a specific person’s interests. 

What is next for Tik Tok?

Right before the most recent federal election, Jagmeet Singh, the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party started his Tik Tok account to promote youth involvement in his campaign. He hopped on trends that weren’t necessarily seen as “professional”, but he took the risk of his reputation among other crowds to get youth engaged. 

As it stands, Tik Tok does not have advertisements on their application in the same way that Facebook or Instagram would. There is no “sponsored” post or boosting, the way that Tik Tok runs their advertisements is much more subtle. Tik Tok will allow you to create trends that become popular by showing up on many people’s “For You” pages. If one famous person does it, everybody wants to do it!

The thing that I love most about the application is that there are people of all age demographics and sub-communities using it. There are plenty of famous grandparents, gamers and everything in between. This makes it easy to reach target demographics and a large number of people effectively. 

The Future of Social Media Content Consumption 

Tik Tok is all videos and it requires no reading further than small captions to understand what a given post is about. In the future, I can see a lot more video use on social media. Tik Tok rose so quickly because of the simplicity of it. Anybody with a phone with a camera can film a tik tok and create content that could blow up. 

Are the next generations going to be illiterate because of applications like Tik Tok? Is it completely useless to consume content that doesn’t necessarily make you academically smarter? I guess we’ll see what the next big trend in social media is, and we can go from there.

Twitter: Gamers, Grandmas and giggles, oh my! Tik Tok is the newest and fastest-growing social media platform out there. Check out why I think that is. 

Facebook: Tik Tok is rapidly growing and becoming one of the most used social media applications in the world for its unique combination of users and simplicity. Read more about the rise of the application here. 

The Dangers of “Doing it for the Gram”

According to Urban Dictionary, doing something “For the Gram” is when you do something for the sole purpose of seeking attention on social media. Is doing something for attention on social media a way to gain new unique experiences, or does it create a harmful precedent for people just trying to live their modest lives? 

You can purchase this shirt on Etsy to satisfy all of your influencer needs.

The Good

Doing it for the gram can allow people to share experiences that they wouldn’t otherwise share. Caitlin Fladager posted a photo of herself sharing the difference between what she looks like on her best day versus an average one. This inspired young users of Instagram that everything is not as it seems and an image might not capture the realities of a moment. 

On a more personal note, I have had a great time with my friends doing something just to post on social media. Like dancing for a TikTok or shining my phone’s flashlight to get the perfect lighting for an Instagram photo. In those cases, doing it for the gram can be a fun way to try new things or bond with your friends for entertainment. 

The Bad 

Outside applications like Facetune spark debate on social media about photoshopping your body to make yourself look perfect for attention online. Vox puts it best when they say that it is an endless pursuit for perfection. Once you make one post that changes your body to look unnatural, you have to consistently follow those regulations for your posts so people don’t realize that it is fake. 

There is a point to be made for the fact that models in magazines and advertisements are also photoshopped constantly, so what makes your influence on social media any different from that? I wonder if there is a place we can reach as a society where we are either completely natural or completely photoshopped to limit the judgment that people receive for choices they make regarding their outward image. 

The Ugly

When I think of the harm that Instagram causes, I usually go straight to body image issues and class-based judgment. Little did I know, there are real-life dangers to full sends on Instagram. Influencer Katarina Elle Zarutskie got bit by a live Shark while trying to pose for the perfect Instagram photo in a pool of sharks. She defended herself by saying “I’ve seen countless photos of people with them on Instagram”. This demonstrates a fairly apparent lack of judgment, just so that she could impress her peers on Instagram. 

Is doing it for the gram a way to express creativity, or does it create a toxic ideology of what your life should be like?

Twitter: Have you ever done something out of your comfort zone just for a “like” or to up your followers? Learn more about the good and bad of our attention seeking here:

Facebook: Instagram has become a platform for people to share their experiences, whether it be travelling, selfies or hanging out with friends. Learn more about the dark sides of what it means to “do it for the gram” by checking out my latest blog post:

“Ok Boomer” and The Generational Divide in Social Media

Everywhere I turn on social media there is a millennial or someone in Generation Z calling out a Baby boomer for their intolerance and ignorance of new ideas. 

The Meme

“Ok Boomer” has rapidly become the most used trend in my social circles after it’s rise on the app TikTok. Between the Climate March led by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, issues around job security and affordability, it makes sense that our older generations should take some of the blame for the anxiety that younger generations face. The trend of call out culture has resulted in actions in attempt to bring the meme into the “real world”.

The joke went as far as the creation of a song on Soundcloud deeming that the war on millennials is over, and that’s just the beginning.

Ok Boomer has become so popular that people are making money off of merchandise. (Source)

Chlöe Swarbrick, a 25-year-old member of the New Zealand Parliament even gave a speech supporting a climate crisis bill and was heckled by an older colleague. Her quick response of “Ok Boomer” caused upset across social media platforms. Leading to her response on Facebook defending her comment as witty and in good humour.

This got me thinking. In a world where social media is accessible to so many people, how does this type of meme make such an influential rise without being shut down by Boomers? 

The Facts 

In January of 2019, 67% of Canadians who have internet access chose to use a social media platform. Younger generations grew up using social media to connect with their friends, find out what their interests are and find their first job. It is an engrained part of their worldview. For Baby Boomers, that isn’t the case.

A company called O.M.E. Gear found that baby boomers use their social media to stay in touch with their loved ones, whereas Gen Z and Millenials use it to document and share their adventures. Gen X and Z users are also trying to intake as much content as possible. Even though they aren’t types to deep-dive into content, they are more engaged in what they do see. Whereas Boomers will read your cousin Stephanie’s Facebook post about her high school graduation 3 times and encourage their friends to do the same.

It makes sense that an application like Tik Tok with 30-second videos with jokes and dances from strangers would not be the place for Boomer’s to get their fix of reconnecting with their loved ones. That must be why even though Boomers are on social networks, they just aren’t on the ones where trends can rise quickly through the connectivity of people you’ve never actually met. 

What’s Next?

Maybe it’s the fact that younger generations don’t have the patience to pay close enough attention to what the Baby Boomers did right to have civil discourse, or maybe it’s just that they’re fed up with the hatred millennials have been getting for years that caused this backlash. 

Either way, the most exciting part about social media trends is that they’re unpredictable. It is hard to believe that the next generation will have a completely different set of apps, devices, and things to complain about due to our lack of action on certain issues. 

Calling out people for their intolerance is a lot easier nowadays that we can do it behind screens anonymously. 

Is it the healthiest way to have productive discussions about the future of the planet? Probably not. Does it give a launching pad to ensuring that our future is more accepting and environmentally conscious? Probably. 

Is it hilarious? Yes, that I know for sure. 

Here’s some bonus “Ok Boomer” content to suit all your needs when you’re angry at the world: 

Tik Tok Compilation 

Baby Boomer Culture Tweets

Twitter: Millennials and Generation Z are fed up with intolerant and archaic views. #OkBoomer is the a lens into the generational divide in social media and demonstrates the power of young people.

Facebook: How can something like “Ok Boomer” become the most popular (and offensive) internet trend overnight? Learn more about the rise of Millennials and Generation Z through social media.