Celebrating the Holidays on Snapchat
Holidays (big and small) are a great opportunity to engage with students on social media. You don’t need to put long hours and a ton of resources into an elaborate holiday video to celebrate. Snapchat offers unique features that other platforms don’t, allowing you to get creative beyond a “Happy Holidays from our university” message.
Here are three ways that you can create opportunities for students to connect with you on Snapchat around the holidays.
1. Host a contest
If you’re not already, you should absolutely be hosting Snapchat contests. For Valentines Day this year, we collaborated with the Office of Student Life on a contest titled “Point Park’s Perfect Pair.” The students who work in Student Life created the geofilter and graphics / advertisements for the contest, and handled the prizes. We hosted the contest on our Snapchat account, created the story and recorded the entries. By positioning the contest as a search for Point Park’s perfect pair, we expanded the entries beyond couples and broadened our reach. This was our first Snapchat story to reach 1,000 views (we are a small, private university) and we received 109 submissions — our most of all time.
2. Put students on your story
You don’t always need a prize to get students to engage with you on Snapchat. Everyone is looking for their fifteen minutes (ahem, three seconds) of fame. Anytime we solicit snaps with the promise of putting students on our story we get a great response. Last Halloween, we asked students to snap us back a happy Halloween selfie and we hosted a geofilter on campus to celebrate the holiday with them. This was a simple, easy and fun way to generate content from our audience.
3. Tap into student creativity
Before holiday break last year, we put a blank Christmas tree outline on our story and asked students to snap us back their decorated designs (again, no prize involved). I was blown away by their creativity. We got submissions representing majors, student organizations, sports teams and even a few from the class of #PointPark21.
I hope this helps spark your creativity for ways to engage with your students on Snapchat around the holidays. Add Point Park University on Snapchat for more: pointparku
