Vanessa Hudgens - Blog #4

I chose to look at my girl Vanessa Hudgen’s social media. From her High School Musical days to her roles in Beastly and Spring Breakers, I love her. I don’t know if I started following her before or after she started dating Austin Butler, but that break up… truly heartbreaking.

 

P.S. sorry if I expose anyone with likes
or follows with this blog

I use social media for different things; for example, I don’t follow many celebrities on Twitter or Facebook, but my Instagram feed is full of them. That’s really the only one where I follow celebrities. I follow a few on twitter, but it tends to get political and I really try not to mix business with pleasure and keep my social media as neutral as I can. But, for the sake of the blog I searched Vanessa on every social media platform I have (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and tik tok). She has an Instagram account with 3,465 posts and 38.2M followers, there is no official twitter account just a lot of fan accounts that report news on her. She has a snapchat account that viewers can subscribe to but unfortunately there was nothing posted the day that I subscribed. Her official Facebook page was under the category of “Musician/Band” and has 1.4M likes. Vanessa does have an official Pinterest account, where she had a few boards and pictures of her that float around on the app. Finally, and arguably most importantly, she does have an official tik tok with six posts and 74.9K followers.

I first looked at her participation on Instagram, because I was most familiar with that. Post break up, she only tended to post once a day, maybe on a good week twice. Pictures mainly consisted of fun things she was doing with friends and family, or of the lovely couple. However, since then she has been seen posting more than once a day and picture content has changed slightly. While she still posts pictures with friends and family, and if you’re lucky you can get a quick pic of her adorable dog Darla, she has started to post pictures that could be considered goofier or more revealing. A new trend she has hopped on to, that I wasn’t aware was a trend until she joined, is #ThirstyThursday. So, on Thursday’s she will post pictures that expose a little more skin or show off her physique, and honestly I am here for it #girlcrush am I right?! She seems consistent with her ad posting, meaning it’s only once in a while and it is either for a company she is sponsoring or for a good cause she believes in.

I skipped Twitter and went to Snapchat to see if there were any updates. Unfortunately I found nothing, but while she didn’t post anything personally I know I have seen news about her on things like “The Rundown” or Cosmopolitan stories that they run through snapchat. So, since that platform was kind of a bust I went to Pinterest to investigate what inspires her board creation. She created 18 boards titled: “on my playlist”, “style, day in the life”, “work”, “oh hey hair”, “inspiration”, “home decor”, “yummy”, “things I love”, “Halloween!”, “cuteness overload”, “nails did”, “festival love”, “wanderlust”, “Gigi on broadway”, “art”, “work out!”, and “my vids”. “Style”, “day in the life”, “work”, “cuteness overload”, “festival love”, “wanderlust”, “Gigi on broadway”, and “my vids” consisted of pictures of herself and the things she does in her life. The others were boards of inspiration and likeness, “nails did” seemed to be a place that she drew inspiration for her next mani pedi set from and “on my playlist” was another inspiration board but also a way to see what she likes to listen to and who she is. “On my playlist” was a wide array of music tastes, that were mainly alternative but ranged from folk sounds, rock, and even rap.

Then I went to check out her Facebook pages. I was most interested to see what kind of content was here because it was categorized as a Musician/Band rather than actress. I found pictures and videos of her and things she was doing in her everyday life or vacations she was taking. But, this was different because there were scattered pictures and videos of her singing and things she had done while performing on broadway, there was even a video of her music evolution throughout the decade. This was different because these pictures and videos weren’t really on any of the other platforms, so that was interesting to see her promoting herself in a different way. Tik Tok was pretty lowkey, she only has six videos and the last one was from December 23rd, 2018. I know just from using Tik Tok that she has an ad for the new Sims game, that can also be seen on her Instagram, this pops up when you first open the app after a while and just plays a short video promotion. From watching her videos, she downloaded Tik Tok to support #CreateForACause which was started by the app. With this cause people would create videos using #CreatForACause to spread love and cheer and Tik Tok would donate money to a charity of your choice. This was interesting because, like Facebook, it was just a different way she presented herself. While she supports causes on other platforms and in other ways, it is not always shown to the public like this, all six of her videos were for this cause and she created her  account solely for this purpose.

It was really interesting to try and look critically at the ways that Vanessa presents herself and promotes her image on different platforms. Typically, when I see her content on Instagram I like it or I’ll drool over how gorgeous she is but other than that I don’t think much of it. After seeing all the different platforms she has and the way that she uses them really showed me how people can use different platforms for different things and how those who consume that information are influenced based on the content they recieve.