(Too?) Late to the Snapchat Party in Higher Education
The University of Victoria was not an early adopter of Snapchat.
I knew that the platform already had over 100 million daily active users.
I had watched the webinars and read the articles about how fantastic Snapchat is for Higher Education.
I knew we needed to take a serious look at Snapchat.
But I didn’t feel like I had the time create a robust content strategy for the platform. So I waited. And waited.
Then late last year I finally sat down to create a username for our university. I was frustrated but not that surprised that our preferred name (uvic) was gone. Our second choice (universityofvictoria) was too long.
Opportunity Knocks When You Least Expect It
While I was mulling over alternative names, I noticed that our students were talking about an account called “uvic.snaps” on Yik Yak, Twitter and Facebook.
In our absence, a UVic student had already created an account for the university!
He would post a story on Sunday nights that was a compilation of the Snaps sent to him by fellow students during the week.
Most of these snaps were fun and innocent: soccer games, baking cookies in dorms, studying. Some of the snaps were less appropriate, such students at parties.
The popularity of this unofficial account provided me even more motivation to get our official account started.
I knew I didn’t want there to be competing university accounts (especially when the student-created one could show more risqué content)! And I still needed help figuring out what exactly our students wanted to see from us on Snapchat.
I asked a colleague who knew the student running the unofficial account to put us in touch.
When we met over coffee, he told me that he was not interested in maintaining the account after he graduated in few months. However, he was interested in gaining more experience for his resume. We decided to collaborate.
A few weeks later, the student started working with us in a temporary part-time position.
He sat with me, showed me how students use the app and answered my many questions.
We brainstormed content ideas. He came to meetings with other students to discuss those ideas.
He also taught me how to find and report the extremely inappropriate imposter accounts when they popped up.
Official Student Takeovers on the Former Unofficial University Snapchat Account
As the academic year was winding down, we created our first official story on the previously unofficial account.
One of our first posts was a student takeover at our annual BFA art show. I invited a student artist who is popular on Instagram to show us the exhibits at the opening gala.
I was nervous about promoting our first takeover on our main social media accounts, as I had never handed a password to a student before. But even with this limited promotion, our first takeover was seen by almost 1,000 people. This would not have been possible without the collaboration that took place.
So far we’ve been actively posting on Snapchat for about a month and have hosted 7 student takeovers.
Our students have taken us on a research trip on the way to Everest Base Camp, a concrete canoe race in Montreal, and an earthquake simulator on our very own campus as you can see in this playlist of archived Snapchat Stories.
Big Snapchat Win
Our account seems to be well received among students. When I visited a class about to leave for Europe on a field school, a few of the students clapped and cheered when I asked if they wanted to do a Snapchat takeover. When I approached another student on Instagram, she wrote me a follow-up email within minutes.
Although I was initially discouraged by the length of time it took us to get started, the challenge created by this unofficial Snapchat university account turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
I had to work closely with students to get our account off the ground, so their voices and opinions have always been central to our approach.
If you want to see for yourself, you can follow our Snapchat account at uvic.snaps.
Meet the Author: Jes Scott
Jes Scott is the Social Media Coordinator at the University of Victoria in Canada. She is also a graduate of Higher Ed Experts’ professional certificate program on social media marketing for higher education.
Tags: Higher Ed Marketing Memos, Higher Ed News