The Hugely Complex Process Of Transferring Obama’s Social Media Accounts To New POTUS

In his eight years as President, Obama was part of many historical firsts including incorporating the whole of social media marketing into the White House.

The Obama presidency was the first to use @POTUS on Twitter, go live on Facebook, the first to answer questions on YouTube, and the first to use a filter on SnapChat. This has to be one of the most media attentive presidencies in history, and the Oval Office’s use of social media platforms have brought us touching moments, historical moments, and absolutely hilarious moments through the last eight years and lead to a historical social media marketing campaign.

Along with the above Whitehouse.gov was revamped, they joined Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, iTunes, and even the old MySpace. One of the paramount creations was the citizen petition platform, We The People. With all of these different avenues of public outreach there are tweets like crazy, pictures through the roof, and video footage that goes on and on, so what happens to all this footage when the administration switches over?

The White House has a plan that they are sharing with the public to allow us to be able to find any of these moments at any time in the future while still leaving a clean slate for the next President of the United States. Here is a look at that plan.

Social Media

The incoming POTUS will take over all existing social media accounts along with all of the current contacts associated with it. However, the slate will be wiped clean. All social media handles will stay the same, but new handles will be created with the number 44 at the end. These accounts will archive all of President Obama and his colleague’s social media posts from the last eight years.

As an example, the Twitter handle is @POTUS. When the next President is elected, they will take over @POTUS and the eleven million followers on that account. All of President Obama’s tweets will be erased from that account and moved over to a new account with the handle of @POTUS44. This is the way all White House social media accounts will work as soon as the new President takes over in office.

WhiteHouse.gov

As with the prior presidencies, everything that is on WhiteHouse.gov up to January 20th, 2017 will be frozen and transferred over to ObamaWhiteHouse.gov where it will remain available to the public. All the information will also be archived with NARA, and then the new POTUS will take over the domain WhiteHouse.gov with a fresh new start. This was done with President Bush and President Clinton in the past.

We The People

We The People has allowed everyday citizens start petitions on anything that want and if the petition receives 100,000 signatures, government officials will respond to the request. There have been over 470,000 petitions created by the over eleven million certified users since the website was created. The site was open sourced, and the White House is making every attempt to have this site available to the next President. All petitions are archived with NARA.

The White House is currently coming up with a way to share all data from the last eight years with the public through zip drive availability. They have reached out to the public to submit ideas on how to creatively archive all the information from President Obama’s time in office. You can submit your thoughts on the White House website.

Let’s hope our next POTUS takes full advantage of the White House social media marketing platform so we can keep our personal and intimate relationship with the next President like we have with Obama.

Featured Image Via WhiteHouse.gov

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