Sac State squirrels generating tweets

Vu Chau
April 22, 2016

A Sacramento State freshman is giving a voice to all squirrels on campus through a Twitter account.

@CSUS_Squirrel’s creator, who asked to keep his true identity anonymous to maintain the squirrels’ appearance, started the profile in December 2015.

“I created the account mainly for the silly idea of pretending to represent the vast majority of the squirrels on campus,” the profile’s creator said.

Tweets of @CSUS_Squirrel are composed by observing how the squirrels act and what he imagines they would say to each other.

“I mostly think to myself, ‘what would a squirrel say about or during this situation?’” he said.

Matthew Fosse, a graduating senior at Sac State studying organizational communication, discovered the profile after noticing one of his pictures was retweeted.

“I thought it was a funny idea and decided to give it a chance and follow it,” Fosse said of the account. “So far, it has lived up to my expectation.”

Fosse tweeted a photo of a squirrel with an apple on a tree branch to @CSUS_Squirrel and received a reply that garnered him more than 30 likes and retweets combined.

“It’s hard to miss the squirrels here at Sac State,” Fosse said. “If I have another awesome interaction with a squirrel like I did before, I will tweet at the account again.”

The account’s creator said gaining followers means people are enjoying his idea enough to want to know more. He also realized the advantage of free publicity through retweets of his followers.

“Now, students are finding my tweets through retweets of fellow students who are following me,” the creator said. “So the popularity seems to be growing.”

Mentioning and tagging Sac State’s profile in his tweets have significantly helped promoting the account as well, he said.

The Sac State’s twitter profile also led Marissa Chavez, a freshman studying child development, to start following the squirrel account.

“I like the profile because it adds a face to all the squirrels around Sac State,” Chavez said. “It’s like if we were talking to them.”

Currently, the creator does not have any specific goals for the profile.

“I’m just having fun exploiting the charismatic behaviors of the squirrels,” he said.