Taking aim at a demographic that may be too young to even vote, the White House on Monday announced that it had launched an official account on Snapchat.
Josh Miller, the White House’s director of product management, made the announcement in a blog post where he said that the White House “aims to provide the American people with a multitude of ways to engage with their government.” With the proliferation of social media directly impacting that strategy, President Obama also now has accounts on Twitter and Facebook.
Miller, formerly of Facebook, notes that “there are over 100 million daily active Snapchat users, and over 60 percent of American smartphone users between the ages of 13 and 34 use the platform.”
The first Snapchat post from the “Official Story” account showed the president’s desk in the Oval Office, with a bowl of apples visible in the foreground. The same apples figured prominently in Jerry Seinfeld’s visit to the White House to film this season’s opener of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”
“Are these washed?” Seinfeld jokingly asked Obama after crunching into an apple while slumped on a couch. Obama then instructs Seinfeld to discard of his apple in “the non-presidential garbage.”
Back on Snapchat, things will presumably be a little more serious on Tuesday as the account promises to take followers “behind the scenes of the White House’s State of the Union preparations, with footage and angles you won’t find anywhere else,” Miller said.
