Introduction to Kristine:
Kristine Brunsman has worked in some capacity with the National Park Service since 2010. Currently Kristine is in a permanent position through the Heritage and Historic Preservation division of the National Park Service and is based out of the WASO (Washington DC) office. Considering the competitive nature of the National Park Service, she has worked as a volunteer, intern, seasonal ranger, and pathways intern at a combined nine park sites, before competing for and earning her current permanent position. Her position duties include developing social media posts for her division of the NPS. In addition to creating social media content for the Heritage and Historic Preservation division, she has created posts for Dry Tortugas National Park, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, Fort Pulaski National Monument and San Antonio Missions National Historic Park.
Interview Highlights:
Within Kristine’s position she creates content for numerous social media platforms, including: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Tumblr, and Periscope. The one social media site that she wishes the National Park Service could use as a whole is Snapchat, as she thinks that Snapchat and Instagram are the two most important social media sites for millennials.
Kristine’s most successful social media post, which was posted on Facebook, was a video post that showed the historic preservation rangers at Dry Tortugas National Park. This post, which was later shared by the main National Park Service page on Facebook, reached over 136,000 people, received over 34,000 video views, had 207 likes, and was shared 322 times. This post can be viewed here: post. We discussed the process and benefit of when the main National Park Service Facebook or Instagram sites share parks or divisions post, their audience reach expands tenfold. Smaller and lesser known park service sites, who have less than 10,000 followers gain so much more audience members with the National Park Service pages share post because the main page has well over 875,000 followers.
When discussing the National Park Service’s ability to attract and maintain current and future followers, Kristine believed that the NPS was not functioning at its fullest potential. Stating that the government is not able to keep up to date with all the latest social media trends and social media platforms due to all the government bureaucracy and the restrictions that follow. Kristine made the point of saying that mangers and those in supervisory positions are the ones to blame for lack of potential. She feels that these supervisors, many of whom are older in age and close to retirement, do not understand the potential of social media and are content with the bare minimum. Kristine also stated that parks need to invest more in hiring social media coordinator positions and stated that rangers working on social media post in their spare time would not cut it in the long run. Considering the National Park Service has well over 300,000,000 visits a year and yet less than 1 million followers on the main park Facebook page, this proves that the NPS is not reaching its fullest potential.