Saving Time and Building Engagement with Snapchat Series

I’ll admit it; I’m a Snapchat convert. It is hands down my favorite channel I manage at Flagler College, but I didn’t always feel this way. Snapchat is built to be incredibly fun. The trouble is that it’s time consuming, and I can imagine if you’re reading this, one thing you’re short on is time.

One of my biggest time-drains when it came to Snapchat was consistently coming up with new, creative content ideas and then either training students to take over the account or building out the content myself. My other problem was that a lot of our content was just covering events, and I wasn’t sure if that was really providing useful content for our current and prospective students.

CUE BRAINSTORM

Luckily, at this point in the process we’d already identified a student who knew how to create a killer Snapchat story. Her name is Emily Jordan, and she’s about to graduate and is looking for a job in social media (hint, hint).

Emily, my boss and I got together for an hour to brainstorm how we could create more consistent, fun and useful content. From that, we came up with four ideas for series we could use again and again on Snapchat.

Flagler Favorites — a monthly takeover where we ask a student to show us their favorite place to visit in town. It pulls double-duty as a way to let current students know about unique hangout spots while also giving prospective students a taste of student life.

Action News Flagler — a twice-monthly show hosted by a “news team” of students that showcases upcoming events, interesting things to see on campus, and lots of corny jokes. Think “Anchorman” as inspiration. Again, this pulled double-duty for current and prospective students.

Snapchat Saturdays — a weekly story where we compile the best snaps students have sent us throughout the week and share them on Saturdays. Credit where credit is due, this idea was inspired by Princeton. Again, this pulls double-duty for current and prospective students (recognizing a pattern?).

Throwback Thursday — a twice-monthly story featuring photos from the Flagler College Archives tied around themes like 90’s style, graduation through the years, etc. Sorry guys, I forgot to save a video of one of these.

THE BENEFITS

Because we weren’t spending all our time training students or just trying to come up with ideas to keep the Snapchat running, we were able to channel our energy into making our one-off Snapchat stories really creative and fun.

THE RESULTS

Over the last few months, our analytics showed us the following growth:

A 30% increase in followers

An 11% increase in views per story

A story completion rate jump from an average of 85% to 89%

On the anecdotal side, we’ve also had lots of students comment about how they look forward to the next installments in our series. Our interns often get recognized both on and off campus for their roles on our Snapchat.

TAKEAWAYS

1. Embrace handing over the reigns: Once we figured out what tone and style we wanted for our Snapchat, we gave our students lots of creative freedom. We’ve been able to build a team of both paid and unpaid students who are really dedicated to creating an amazing Snapchat experience because they feel like they have some creative control.
2. Creating > documenting: Overall, we’ve found we get a better response when we create content that’s engaging on its own, rather than focusing heavily on documenting events that are happening on campus.
3. Snap stories are just that, stories: When putting together stories, we ask ourselves if the snaps feel like they fit together and form a narrative. We’ve found that if our Snap stories don’t have a distinct beginning/middle/end arc, our story completion rate drops.
4. Build your Snap Squad: It took us a while to build a team of dedicated students, but having a team has helped us tremendously. If you’re trying to build a squad, ask students you know about which students they love to follow on Snapchat. Also, if your school has a communications department, ask them for student recommendations and check and see if the program requires internship hours. We’ve found lots of student help because students were looking for internship hours.
5. Look outside the Higher Ed box: We follow lots of other Higher Ed institutions to find creative new ideas for Snapchat, but we’ve found some of our biggest sources of inspiration from outside the Higher Ed bubble. One of our most successful stories ever was inspired by one of Taco Bell’s Snapchat stories — seriously, they’re great. Think outside the box (or bun).

Over to you: where do you fall in the love/hate scale on Snapchat? What efforts have you tried to make your Snap stories more engaging, and how have they worked out?