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How SparkNotes social media accounts mastered the art of meme-ing literature
https://mashable.com/article/sparknotes-twitter-instagram-literature-memes/
Most millennials know SparkNotes as the ultimate no-nonsense study buddy, but today’s students not only receive help with schoolwork from the website, they get high-quality entertainment, too.
SparkNotes remains a crucial tool for text comprehension — full of study guides and supplemental resources on english literature, philosophy, poetry, and more. But over the past two years it’s also become a source of some of the internet’s most quick-witted, thought-provoking, and ambitious memes.
SparkNotes’ Twitter and Instagram accounts have carved a unique niche for themselves online by posting literary memes that find perfect parallels between classic works like Macbeth, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and Frankenstein, and present-day pop culture favorites like The Office, Parks and Rec, and more.
It may come as a surprise to those who once frequented the site for the sole purpose of better understanding Shakespeare plays before a final exam or catching up on assigned chapters of The Catcher in the Rye before the bell rang, but SparkNotes is cool now, and absolutely killing the social media game.
As someone who spends the majority of her workday on the internet and splits her leisure time almost exclusively between reading books and re-watching episodes of The Office, I fell in love with the account’s near-perfect meme execution after mere minutes of scrolling through posts.
In a world with so many bad brand tweets and tone-deaf memes, I felt compelled to seek out the well-read meme masters behind SparkNotes’ social media to learn how it is they manage to make each and every post so good.
How SparkNotes’ social media became LIT ✨📚
Chelsea Aaron, a 31-year-old senior editor for SparkNotes, is a huge part of the success. She started managing the site’s Instagram in September 2017, and her meme approach has helped the account grow from 5,000 to 134,000 followers.
“When I first started managing the account, I tried a bunch of different things,” Aaron explained in an email. “I ran illustrations and original content from our blog, and I also borrowed memes from our Twitter … The memes seemed to get the most likes, so I started making and posting those on a regular basis, and now I try to do four to five per week.”