Abstract:

Social media play growing role in promoting events for youth. It was already proved that the most effective way of inviting young people to any kind of event is to do it with the use of properly used networking and social services in the Internet. This applies not only to real meetings, concerts, games, actions, etc., but also to the virtual ones. Social media are faster, more reliable and more frequently attended than traditional media or traditional promotional campaigns. Needless to say that the same applies to great religious events, like pilgrimages, Pope’s visits, youth conventions and religious festivals.

One of the interesting side effects of social media promotional actions in this case is their educational value. It manifests itself in smaller or bigger portions of background data in form of blogs, posts, short movies, photo galleries, comments and even mems and gifs submitted before and during great religious events to various social media platforms. Of course, the educational impact is enlarged by natural aggregation of various services, interchanging the messages, promoting them, mushing them up and sharing.

In our research we studied interesting case of one of the biggest religious events for youth that takes place every two or three years in various countries after first being proposed by Pope John Paul II in 1985. In 2016, the World Youth Day was organized in Krakow, Poland. Our case study will cover the period of preparation, as well as the one week festival itself and the immediate impact afterwards. We will use social media analytics to verify our hypotheses about intensive educational value achieved with the use of social media presentation of this great religious event in Krakow.

Keywords:

WYD, social media, Krakow, educational value.