University marketers: try making your message more Snapchatty

If you think Snapchat is only used in universities by students documenting their antics in the pub, you may be missing a marketing trick. As a virtual space where young people congregate, communicate and share, it provides plenty of opportunities for marketers to showcase the best of their institutions.

We spoke to three universities who have used Snapchat stories – a feature that allows you to publish a collection of photos and videos that can be viewed for 24 hours – to run campaigns.

Sharing Clearing news

The media team at Anglia Ruskin University found out from early forays into Snapchat that they needed to put in plenty of legwork to keep a story going and get followers, so that they didn’t end up hosting an empty party.

With those foundations laid, they allowed student ambassadors to take over the official account, giving a behind-the-scenes look at what was happening during the Clearing process and inviting young people to share their experiences.

The campaign evolved naturally. “Followers posted images with their results, pictures of the email saying ‘You’re in’, or snaps of visiting campus,” says Katy Christie, communications manager at the university. The account picked up 106 new followers on the first day, and young people even started to contact them directly about Clearing on Snapchat.

But Christie points out that the main idea was to give young people a space to share thoughts with one another about starting their university lives. “It is user-to-user interaction, and we are the facilitators,” she says.

For a platform like Snapchat, which is all about being informal and spontaneous, it’s sensible to take a step back and create a place for your audience to share ideas, rather than just promoting your university. But the thought of ceding control in this way can bring some marketers out in a cold sweat. Christie says the key is to find and deliver a message in an authentic and original way that “doesn’t sound corporate”.

“We worked a lot on the tone and types of stories we wanted to tell, to make them more about real life and real people, rather than pushing a message,” she says.

Documenting travel adventuresNewcastle University used Snapchat to follow three undergraduates on their research trips to Chile, the Arctic Circle and an archaeology dig in Lufton in the UK. Each project had a 24-hour feature slot on Snapchat, which was chosen by the team for its natural, impromptu feel.

“With Instagram, people feel they need to share the perfect picture,” says Matt Horne, digital marketing and social media officer at the university. “But Snapchat is more in the moment and is easier – you can create these stories, then they are gone.”

Weren’t they worried about letting students loose with an official university social media account? Horne explains that it is possible to monitor Snapchat account from a different device – if you see something untoward, you can log on and override the student – but stresses that they didn’t need to use this function.

“We set the ground rules, and our students are really trustworthy,” says Horne. “But it’s good to know you have an emergency stop button if you need it, especially when they are away.”

It was hard to measure the outcome of this experiment, however, because Snapchat isn’t set up for businesses, so there are very few analytics available.

Newcastle’s team chose to screenshot every picture before it expired, as Snapchat shows engagement statistics. This process is manually tedious, Horne admits, but gave them the information they needed to see where users dropped off. The story overview list also collates this information, but in less detail.

Horne’s advice for others is to become familiar with the Snapchat software before setting up an official account. “Follow other accounts, see what they are doing, and how you can fit in,” he says.

Celebrating graduation

Loughborough University has been using Snapchat since June 2015, and currently has more than 4,000 followers. “We use it for a variety of reasons – recruitment, internal comms, raising awareness of events and showing the student experience,” says Liam Ross, digital engagement officer at the university.

Their most successful campaign was this year’s graduation celebrations. The university set up #LboroGrad2016 and invited students and soon-to-be graduates to share their pictures from the day. “They took the story where we couldn’t go,” says Ross. “It gave it a personal touch which other students could connect with.”

Many students also shared their snaps on other social networks, such as Twitter and Instagram. Ross advises university marketers to follow the students’ lead: “You need to signpost Snapchat from your other social media platforms and email comms, to build your follower count.”

The campaign used “geofilters” (overlays that tell you where and when the snap was taken). These boosted the reach of the campaign and helped with analytics, because Snapchat provides figures on how many filters are used. Loughborough’s frames were used 1,200 times and viewed 126,000 times. This information helped the team build a broader picture of engagement, and proved the success of the campaign.

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