3 tips to track success on Snapchat
Fact: Snapchat is an important part of social media strategy in higher education.
Fact: Social managers have limited time and resources.
Fact: Third party analytics programs for Snapchat are expensive. [Ed. Note: this may also break the Snapchat Terms of Service so be careful]
At Grand Valley State University, we create fun and engaging campaigns and weekly segments on Snapchat to share with nearly 3,000 followers.
For us, Snapchat has become an important platform that helps us build school pride and share important messages.
Proving success, calculating ROI, and tracking metrics in general on Snapchat can be challenging since we can’t easily measure our engagement on the platform as we do for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The availability of native analytical data and the timeframe in which we have to gather data is limited on Snapchat.
However, we’ve found success at tracking numbers by going back to the basics. These three simple and quick tips help us track progress and engagement, and ultimately, our success on Snapchat.
TIP 1: Use Excel to track what is available
Track number of snaps, starting views, ending views and screenshots.
On your own phone, take a screenshot of the first snap, last snap, and of the list of snaps in your story. These few screenshots can be used to track the timeframe in which snaps were posted, when the time snaps were analyzed, starting views, ending views and number of screenshots. After you take those screenshots, you can add the numbers to your Excel spreadsheet anytime.
You’ll be able to look back and see how long the story was active before you tracked it and calculate the completion rate of the story. Having this data in one location will allow you to see patterns. For example, we noticed that stories with less than 8 snaps were viewed more compared to stories with more than 8 snaps (an exception is a takeover).
TIP 2: Set an alarm
Set an alarm to remind yourself to log in and track a story. It’s a simple tip, but it has helped us immensely. Before we established a tracking system, we lost data a few times simply because the story expired before we could log in to track it. Track the story as close to the 24-hour expiration time as possible, without going over. Tracking at this time will allow you to get the most accurate view count without losing the data on the first snap. You could also take screenshots of the numbers you want to track and log them later.
TIP 3: Pull feedback from other platforms
Tracking the number of screenshots, interactions and views will provide quantitative data that will help you get an idea of what stories resonate with your audience. But, if you’re looking for qualitative feedback as well, reference comments made by your followers on your other social media platforms.
If you’re like us, those types of comments are priceless and reaffirm the time and energy we dedicate to growing our presence on this platform.
What other tips or advice do you have for tracking success on Snapchat?
— Writers: Leah Twilley, Matthew Makowski & Jaclyn Ermoyan
