What do the Pope, Kim Kardashian, and Taylor Swift all have in common? Over 20 million Twitter followers, of course! But what Kim K and T Swift don’t have is a host of tech savvy college students working behind the scenes. After speaking with a few Villanova University students who were an integral part in starting Pope Francis’s Twitter account in 2012, NPR‘s Jennifer Lynn reports on how these students rocked the Vatican’s profile, showing just how influential social media and the millennial generation remain today.
With a host of 20 million followers reading his tweets in English and eight other languages, the Pope is truly staying up-to-date. Tweeting every three or four days, Pope Francis works under the handle @Pontifex, meaning “bridge builder” in Latin. Linda Sharkey from The Independent claims that Pope Francis is mostly on Twitter because he is afraid of the backlash and abuse he might receive on other sites such as Facebook. But we can’t all just assume that the Pope is Mr. Technology, tweeting away while still being the head of the Catholic Church.
Tatum Murray and Mika Rhabb, two students who were a part of Villanova’s Vatican internship program, were a central part in bringing the Pope up to speed on today’s biggest social media trends. A communications major in her junior year, Murray was asked to take pictures of the Pope at events and post them on Instagram. She was also the one who posted the breaking news that the Catholic church would celebrate the Jubilee of Mercy. Murray said, “Being a big Instagrammer myself, I could bring that skill to the team. The team is a group of people who are middle-aged or older, so they aren’t really as up on Instagram.”
Rhabb, a recent graduate of Villanova, was a part of the team that launched the Papal Twitter account. She explained, “This is a huge step for a religious leader like the Pope to actually take a step into social media to try and reach out to the youth, or not just the youth, but everybody, to make him more tangible.”
So is it a new commonality for a couple of twenty-somethings to represent world leaders to the rest of the world? It sure looks that way. Because the younger generations understand social media and use it daily, they are able to more carefully analyze what hashtag makes a good Tweet or which caption goes best with which Instagram post. Students like Murray and Rhabb hold the answers to our most misunderstood social media questions, and it won’t take long for more millennials to take over the working business world of digital communication.
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