Adopting Snapchat is about deciding to embrace ‘fun’
For about two years now, I’ve had students and colleagues at the University of Prince Edward Island telling me “UPEI needs a Snapchat account!” I didn’t agree. Managing our social accounts (something I do along with helping to maintain our website and producing all of our promotional videos) was more than enough work, and adding something else to the mix didn’t seem necessary. I didn’t see the value when there was so little opportunity to go viral on Snapchat as we have on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. I was already managing an Instagram account that shares pretty pictures of campus (nevermind the recent Snapchat clone inside the app).
On top of that, building a community on Snapchat can be tricky. You constantly have to be encouraging people to follow you via other platforms. We’re all tired of seeing Snapcodes as Twitter and Facebook avatars. And for what? No metrics. No reports. Nothing formal. It’s hard to see Snapchat as a tool when it acts so much like a toy.
While I spent months rejecting the idea of an institutional Snapchat account, I was snapping daily with my friends. I sent hundreds of snaps and watched hours and hours of friends’ stories. I’d taken selfies with my kids using each of the Lenses dozens of times. When Instagram launched their Stories feature in August, I played with it a bit, but ultimately returned to Snapchat because face-swapping with a four-year-old is more fun than not.
Snapchat was a toy, and one I enjoyed playing with. It made me laugh. It was inherently fun.
And then I realized I’d been missing the point: I was so caught up in Snapchat’s lack of traditional usage and formal business-focused features that I forgot that it was fun.
And fun was all it needed to be.
At UPEI, we pride ourselves with being a personable school. Most faculty and staff make an effort to learn students’ names and become engaged in the campus community. We want our students to have fun while they’re with us, and Snapchat could be a perfect way to engage them in a light, informal way. So I dove in.
Launching a new account is frustrating. Starting from zero sucks. I wanted to give students a reason to follow our account right off the bat, so I reached out to our New Student Orientation coordinator, and we made our new Snapchat account an official channel of UPEI’s NSO. One of the NSO leaders took over the account during orientation weekend, so we now had a huge percentage of our incoming students incentivised to follow before classes even began.
When orientation wrapped, I took it back. Sure, I’ve been doing boring things like inviting students to submit questions and reminding them to buy a parking pass, but I’ve also snapped silly pics of sandwiches and have been searching for students to do another takeover. Students sharing their own unique UPEI experiences with each other (and hopefully some prospective students) is something I’m looking forward to.
By the end of the first week, we had about 250 users viewing our story, or about 5% of our student population. This is a far cry from our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube followings, but it’s a start. I’ll take it.
As social media managers, we love to quantify and analyze. We over-complicate and formalize. But, what if we tried to let that go just a little bit? What happens if we put our spreadsheets and content calendars aside and just try to have fun with our students?
I’m excited to find out.
Want to follow UPEI on Snapchat? Add us at uofpei.
