Increasing Student Engagement through Snapchat

Our social media team at Campbell University loves Snapchat. It can be so many things to so many users. It can be fun, informative, and entertaining all at the same time. On the flip side, it can also be extremely time consuming for content creators.

If your social media team is anything like mine, sometimes you just don’t have time to storyboard a clever skit or send someone to cover an event that is happening really early or really late at night.

That’s why I decided to put the ball (or snaps in this case) in the students’ court this summer. The week before move-in weekend, I snapped a series of photos giving students options of what they would like to see more of on our Snapchat account this semester.

As you can see from the video below, I had the statue of our founder ask the question, then encouraged students to screenshot their favorite option so we would have a tally.

Our students most wanted to see a #TakeOverTuesday feature with the brain games and trivia coming in second. That didn’t come as a shock to me, but the number of students requesting alumni takeovers did. Not only did I gain information to help back up my case of letting students take over our Snapchat account, I also discovered that our students want to know what alumni are doing with their Campbell degrees.

What I learned from this little experiment was that asking for student input, albeit sometimes scary, ultimately leads to students feeling valued and understood. It also can spark some really great content ideas that have the potential to increase engagement with multiple audiences through a variety of social media platforms.

What are your students asking to see on Snapchat?

BONUS: We had a lot of success with the brain game snap. Many students screenshotted that image just to solve the puzzle. See if you can find our mascot, Gaylord (🐪) in this snap from earlier this summer.