U.S. Postal Service Tries to Stay Relevant by Increasing Social Media Presence

By Willis Plummer Tue., Jul. 19 2011 at 3:06 PM

The 2012 Cherry Blossom Centennial Stamp

Yesterday, the dying government institution that is the United States Postal Service made one last attempt at staying relevant by offering sneak-peeks of new 2012 stamps over Facebook and Twitter. They will post a new stamp every weekday for some undetermined amount of time. The USPS social-media person must be too old to appreciate the irony in trying to save snail mail on the interwebs, or maybe the Postal Service has finally realized that the only young people who are going to buy stamps are irony-loving hipsters.

The new Edgar Rice Burroughs stamp

So far, USPS has unveiled two new stamps; one celebrates the cherry blossom centennial and the other honors Edgar Rice Burroughs (who?). After a quick Wikipedia search, we learned that he's the author of that Disney movie Tarzan. Just saying: If this new social media campaign is in fact an attempt to reach a younger audience, the next stamp should probably honor someone who hasn't been dead for 60 years.

Until the day, we young folk will continue to believe that The Postal Service is just some band that pre-teen girls like.

[@willisplummer]

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Renee

There is no doubt that the younger generations are sending fewer letters and mail through the postal service aka "snail mail" than previous generations. These generations are on social media, so it makes sense to try and engage with them there. I do agree though that if they use social media to unveil stamps, however they should be at least be of people/places that are well known and recognized by these generations.

the facts please would be nice

the media just keeps wrighting articales , with no facts, do you really know whats going on at the postal service, the postal service is a long way from dieing, did you know that the postal service if not for the pre funding of the heatlh retiement fund the postal service book a profit of 1.5 billion dollars, the last four years, media needs to research the facts before writing

Hasn't mail declined significantly over the past decade? Also, didn't the postal service see a $8.5 billion budget shortfall in 2010? Where did you see they could of made money? Could you post your source?

I think they are struggling due to their regulations to deliver mail 6 out of 7 days a week and to every address in the US. I am fairly sure their main source of income is junk mail postage. I still send a handcrafted card on occasion but I am a supporter of the digital age. I wonder why the postal service has yet to implement an email provider or digital messaging service.

Tomandiner

the facts are there , the prefunding causes the loss