College Twitter Accounts Get In On The Pokémon Go Action

Here’s what seems to have happened Monday morning: The millennial employees who run the social media accounts for college campuses across the country came into work and asked if everyone else was just as addicted as they were to “Pokémon Go.”

Maybe their bosses then asked if anyone still cares about Pokémon, and mentioned their kids used to trade the cards in middle school about 17 years ago. The social media managers tried to explain Pokémon Go is a new smartphone game that was released Thursday. Then they mentioned they saw a Pidgey walking into the office and ― 💡 ― came up with a fun, non-controversial tweet to send from the university’s Twitter account.

This is only a hypothetical (but likely) illustration of how universities decided the best way to present their campuses right now is as places you can stumble across some invisible Pokémon.

Of course, some started getting in on the action last week, like the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

One school, William Paterson University in New Jersey, created a whole Instagram account for it.

Pokémon Go is the most popular iOS app in the U.S. since its release last week. Right now it’s more popular than Tinder on Android devices, and it’s even sparking missed connections on Craigslist.

If the popularity of Pokémon Go keeps up, you can bet that some colleges will have a whole new kind of campus tour arranged for prospective applicants in the fall.

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Tyler Kingkade is a national reporter who covers higher education and is based in New York. You can contact him at tyler.kingkade@huffingtonpost.com, or find him on Twitter: @tylerkingkade.