Using emojis to tell students that a Princeton University professor won a Nobel Prize would have been anathema a few years ago, even among social media teams like ours. Getting students interested in a news conference about the award would have been a serious challenge. Not so in October 2015, when we celebrated economist Angus Deaton's achievement and featured moments—both funny and laudatory—from his press conference in a Snapchat story. It opened with a smiling photo of him and a caption complete with tiger face and thumbs-up emojis.
How did we get here? First, Snapchat—best known for its short-lived, disappearing messages—is one of the most popular and fastest-growing mobile apps among people under 25. It has more than 100 million daily active users. Seventy-seven percent of traditional-age college students use Snapchat every day, according to a 2014 survey by the marketing firm Sumpto, and the Pew Research Center found that more than 41 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds use the app. Why? These age groups have seen that what happens online stays online—and can come back to haunt you. So while Snapchat's ephemeral content flummoxes many people over 25, younger users have flocked to the app because their creatively captioned and illustrated photos and videos will disappear. (They can also chat within the app.) It's easy to see why organizations, brands, and content creators such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ESPN, CNN, Comedy Central, BuzzFeed, and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, would want to attract this young demographic. But just because Princeton students—and prospective undergraduates—are on Snapchat didn't necessarily mean their university should be. Or did it?
To snap or not to snap?
It's easy to get caught up in the buzz about a new social platform, but pause and think strategically before you add something to your mix of channels.
When a new platform pops up, the Princeton social media team waits to see if it's something our audience uses. We then determine whether they want us in that space and if we have the resources to create a worthwhile and sustainable user experience.
We started a Snapchat account in April 2014. We established a presence because the app's ability to share photos, text, and video in story form allows us to reach two important cross-sections of our target audience—current and prospective students. Facebook and Twitter are now considered traditional social media platforms, as evidenced by their increasing popularity among older adults. Snapchat entices potential advertisers by claiming it's the best way to reach young people, who use the app to express themselves without the "need to curate an everlasting persona."
Colleges and universities that want to reach and engage young people need to do so where they are. If we have something to share with current or prospective students, Facebook and Twitter are not our first options. Snapchat is what we want to use.
Tell me a story
As with every social network, we experimented with how to interact with our audience on Snapchat. Our output evolved from occasional campus beauty photos and video clips of university events to stories, a feature that allows account managers to string together photos and videos that create a narrative. The stories, which can be viewed multiple times, are available for 24 hours. I liken them to segments on a television news program or entertainment website.
But even if we find something that works really well in one story, our challenge is to be different in the next one. We've shown everything from a hip-hop dancer demonstrating steps for students, which we produced with the feel of a live event, to a more scripted story staged on a tennis court, where a student-athlete brought to life findings from his senior thesis—"Data Analytics in Professional Tennis"—and encouraged people to attend a match. We often show the latter example to campus partners to help them understand what Snapchat is, how we use it, and how we can help them reach students.
As with other social media platforms, we can use Snapchat to share our stories with the people who follow our account. But unlike with Facebook or Twitter, interaction among a snap sender and recipient stays between those two accounts. Our snaps regularly receive 1,000 to 1,500 views, mostly from students, young alumni, and prospective undergraduates. They frequently send us snaps in response to a story, but only our team members can see that engagement—no one else has the opportunity to interact. That's great for the privacy and personalized experience students seek but not so great for higher education social media managers.
We enjoy interacting one-on-one with our followers, but we need to justify the time we invest in Snapchat. A 30-second story can involve hours of planning and shooting. Is the work we're putting in and the fun we're having on Snapchat furthering Princeton's communications efforts?
When our followers like, share, or comment on content on our other social platforms, they expose their friends and followers to it, giving them a chance to connect with Princeton as well. But Snapchat does not provide the same exposure. The platform's limited metrics allow you to see how many and which accounts viewed each photo or video in a Snapchat story, who took a screenshot, and the total number of screenshots for each photo or video. (You can also see your Snapchat score—a number that changes based on how many snaps your account has sent and received, stories you've posted, and other factors determined by the platform.)
But we know that Snapchat's closed communication style won't increase Princeton's reach. Could we get that another way?
Making Saturdays special
Princeton students are our partners on Snapchat. We always ask how we're doing and what we could do better. Their positive responses told us that our efforts were worth it. The snaps they send us are interesting, funny, and inspiring. As my former colleague social media specialist Jill Feldman likes to say: "It's fun to see that we can put out a pretty good snap, then get an even better one back."
We can't stand the idea of letting this great content disappear forever so, despite Snapchat's intentionally ephemeral nature, we often don't. When you receive a snap, you can capture it with a screenshot. When that happens, the app notifies the sender that a screenshot has been taken. We decided to make this option—and student-generated content—work for us.
In September 2014, we started Snapchat Saturday—a way to preserve and celebrate the creativity of the Princeton community by sharing their snaps in a weekly photo gallery on the university's Facebook page. This would allow us to promote our presence on the platform to a much larger audience.
We didn't know how students would respond to this experiment. If it failed, we were prepared to stop after the first week. But soon after we asked them to snap us photos for Snapchat Saturday, we were inundated with fun and creative submissions that gave us an interesting glimpse into students' lives. Popular themes include weather and seasons (particularly fall), squirrels, campus locations and experiences, hanging out, late-night homework and study sessions, exam stress, food, school spirit, general goofiness, and selfies, of course. Students vie to get their snaps into our Snapchat Saturday albums, where other people engage with the photos by liking, sharing, and commenting on them. These interactions highlight the Princeton student experience while raising awareness of our Snapchat account and boosting Facebook engagement and reach on what is typically a slow day.
Snapchat Saturday presents prospective students with an authentic view of student life at Princeton and offers parents and alumni a peek at what's happening on campus. It also gives current students a reason to stay tuned to the university's Facebook account, which shares important information such as weather alerts, emergency updates, and campus news. More than 18 months of Snapchat Saturdays later, we consider the experiment a success—one that will continue as long as our students enjoy participating.
Building campuswide content
Per Princeton's social media strategy, the university has only one Snapchat account. Building a following can be challenging because you can't count on organic reach. We encourage faculty and staff members who want to use Snapchat to work with our office.
This approach helps us in three ways:
- Potential Princeton Snapchat followers aren't asked to follow so many accounts that they feel overwhelmed and tune out.
- Campus partners, who often oversee their unit's social media efforts in addition to other responsibilities, get the benefit of reaching the largest Snapchat audience possible without having to maintain a consistent presence on the platform.
- We can expose followers to content from experts in various academic fields and a wide array of student life, a mix that's both fun and informative.
We've seen that Snapchat can also be a powerful tool in a universitywide communications effort. When tasked with increasing student awareness of an important spring 2015 survey regarding campus attitudes on sexual misconduct, our social media team sought students' help. While institutional messaging is important, students speaking to their peers can have an even greater impact. During the four-week survey period, we used the hashtag #WeSpeakPrinceton across our social media platforms. To encourage participation, we featured unscripted videos of students urging people to voice their views and complete the survey. After weeks of videos on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, a final social media push in early April included a survey reminder on Snapchat—an effort that contributed to an increase in the response rate.
Over the course of the 2014–15 academic year, our Snapchat strategy grew more successful. We were creating interesting and entertaining stories, collecting valuable user-generated content, and sharing it with a large audience to produce greater engagement. But as the semester wound down in spring 2015, we were concerned that the momentum might halt when students left for the summer, particularly because Princeton has no summer session.
No time to slow down
With fewer campus happenings to cover and no students to provide substantial Snapchat Saturday content, we sent the project on summer break, temporarily ending the Facebook feature after commencement. We planned to reboot it after the first week of classes in the fall 2015 semester.
To fight the summer lull, we introduced Princeton in Your Pocket. The idea: Students who follow Princeton on Snapchat could stay connected to the university through short stories that focused on the campus spots they love and miss when they're away. A student designed a fitting graphic—a tiger tail sticking out of a jean pocket—to raise awareness, and we began a new experiment.
We produced Princeton in Your Pocket segments several times a week, featuring favorite places such as Prospect Garden, Firestone Library, Nassau Hall, and the university's art museum. These digital love letters in photo and video form continued our presence on Snapchat and earned heartfelt snaps back from students.
In addition to regular stories and snaps, we promoted the new feature on Facebook and Twitter, inviting our audiences to keep Princeton in their pocket all summer. By the end of August, there was no significant drop in story views or engagement, and our Snapchat score continued to increase as students prepared to come back to campus.
Then we made a move of our own. When we started our Snapchat account, the username was Princeton_U. We weren't thrilled with the underscore, but PrincetonU was already taken. We discovered it was available just as the fall 2015 semester began.
Building a worthwhile and platform-specific presence takes time, so changing our account username wasn't a decision we took lightly. But eliminating the underscore would make our username easier for new followers to find. And we had fun communicating the change to our current followers in a short Snapchat story. A month later, PrincetonU was the name we used when we congratulated Angus Deaton on his Nobel Prize.
Snapchat is becoming the preferred communication platform for prospective and traditional-age college students, and institutions will need to develop a strategy that addresses it. How will Princeton use this creative storytelling method this year? After communicating with emojis for a Nobel Prize in economics, there's no telling where we'll go from here.
How to snap wisely
Snapchat is a great way to engage our students. It's creative, fun, and students love it, making it an increasingly important tool for Princeton. Here's some advice to consider before you begin using it for your institution.
- Sign up for your own account. Learn to use the app and play around with its features as an individual before you send snaps from an institutional account.
- Check your ego at the door. Users value authenticity and will not tolerate promotions. If you must market, limit it—and be artistic and creative in your effort.
- Post to create value, not derive value. This practice is true on every social platform but even more so on Snapchat.
- Authenticity is not for the faint of heart. If you're squeamish about R-rated material and "to be honest" (TBH) comments that are very honest, well, you've been warned.
- Develop a strategy for responding to the snaps you receive. Last year we snapped students back with images of an animated tiger. This year we send photos of the Princeton Tiger—that's me in the mascot suit—in action across campus.
- Use a stylus. We use an orange one—to show school spirit—with our office's iPhone. If you don't draw and write on photos when you use Snapchat, you're missing out.
—Ryan Maguire
From novice to know-how in five easy steps
If you've never created a Snapchat story, here's a primer.
- Attend a campus event and open your Snapchat app.
- Take a photo. Once you've got your picture, look for the "T" at the top of your screen. Touch it, then type the name of the event to let your followers know what is happening. Add this first snap to your story by touching the small square with a plus symbol inside it at the bottom of the screen.
- Take a video by pressing and holding the same button you used to take a photo. Move the camera slowly from left to right so your audience can experience the event's sights and sounds. Add it to your story.
- Take another photo. This time, add a line of text that summarizes the event, points viewers to more information, or thanks the audience for watching. Add it to your story.
- You're done! With a beginning, middle, and end, you have created a Snapchat story.
That was a snap, right? Keep practicing, and you'll be a pro in no time.
—RM
Follow me
Looking for inspiration? Check out what these institutions are doing on Snapchat.
Colorado State University
coloradostateu
The George Washington University (D.C)
gwuniversity
Miami University (Ohio)
miamiuniversity
Newcastle University (U.K.)
newcastleuni
University of Michigan
uofmichigan
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
unlincoln
West Virginia University
westvirginiau
Is your institution using Snapchat? Let us know! Tweet your username to @CASEAdvance.