Is it time to think about rebalancing your social media portfolio?
After the announcement of the Facebook News Feed change last Thursday, higher ed social media professionals have been all abuzz about the strategy to adopt to save reach on the “friendly” platform. By throttling even further the reach of any organic posts published by Pages, Facebook has thrown away all the hard work publishers, brands and schools put in acquiring followers there. Since Instagram is also a Facebook property, I can’t help but wonder if the visual network is going to follow a similar strategy soon.
In this context, it’s probably a good idea to make sure your social media portfolio – aligning with the preferences of your school’s audiences – is well-balanced to mitigate future risks.
There’s been a lot of talk about the recent demise of Snapchat as it failed to reach growth and revenue targets since it went public. The hype was very high before it went public, so were the expectations. So, it was bound to disappoint.
The data Snapchat doesn’t want you to see…
Nothing terribly surprising for a public company that has been repeatedly copied and ripped off by its main competitors as the Story format you can now find everywhere attests.
According to the Daily Beast’s report, data at Snap is kept very close to the chest and access requires almost security 4 clearance and a blood test ;-). So, the fact that Ms. Lorenz managed to get her hands on 6 months of Snapchat usage data isn’t a small feast.
The very long piece she wrote focuses on the culture of secrecy at Snapchat and shares a few downward pointing graphs (including one of Snapchat Map use), but the data itself gets a bit lost in this long-form report.
Fortunately, she also shared the 37-page PDF file containing all the graphs from the leak.
If you are a regular reader, you know my obsessive love for data (I’m the person who spends more than 50 Hours dissecting the data of the College Student and Parent E-Expectations Study for fun after all), so I had to dive in to find the most interesting data for higher ed marketers using or considering Snapchat as a platform to communicate with future or current college students.
Why use Snapchat in higher education?
Because college students are the core user group of this platform. Snapchat is more an addiction than a communication channel for them according to the 2017 E-Expectations Study by Ruffalo Noel-Levitz. While they use it mainly with their friends, they use it every day.
Top 5 findings from the Snapchat data leak for higher ed marketers
But, let’s go back to the data from the Snapchat leak spanning from the week of April 28, 2017 to the week of September 15, 2017.
Below are the most relevant findings for higher ed marketers in 5 charts I edited.
Snapchat users spend on average more than half an hour per day on Snapchat. This average aggregates very different realities across demographic groups. So, this half an hour a day should be seen as a minimum when it comes to your audience of prospective and current college students.
When I looked at the usage data, it was interesting to see the pattern of peaks and valleys for daily users, total snaps, stories, geofilter uses. It is very common on Websites – depending of the type it can reflect the weekly use on work related sites. In the case of Snapchat, the pics seem to occur on weekends.
The average number of snaps posted to Stories tops at 266 million on Saturday. The more interesting things you do, the more you want to share it with your network of friends, right? The proof is in the pictures!
The data shows a change in pattern between the end of June and mid-August – which is characteristics of social media usage at your institution I’m sure. This shows how much Snapchat is a communication platform for users on the academic cycle.
Another interesting peak I’ve noticed in the data can be found in the Daily Sponsored Geofilter Uses. Your guess would be as good as mine, but unless there was a major ad buy on the platform at the end of June (or a glitch in the data collection), my hypothesis to explain this 3-million bump in sponsored geofilter uses is that graduation ceremonies led to the acquisition of many geofilters by schools and institutions – and subsequent sharing by happy graduates.
The data from the Daily Beast’s leak also shows how much Snapchat is a visual chat app. With a daily average of 30 to 34 messages sent per unique user, the app is more messaging app (remember the incredible numbers of text teenagers could send when carriers were not offering unlimited text?) than social media. It’s a communication tool first and foremost – not the broadcasting platform schools, brands and Snap itself would like it to be.
If you need recent aggregate usage numbers (to impress decision makers with big numbers or for your next conference presentation), you can access all the data from the Snap leak at the bottom of the Daily Beast’s article.
Oh, and please let me know what you think about all this data. I’d love to hear your analysis.
Meet the Faculty: Karine Joly
Higher Ed Experts is a professional online school for digital professionals working in universities and colleges.
When you take a professional certificate course with us, you get a chance to upgrade your skills by working on your projects, interacting with classmates just like you and getting detailed personalized feedback from your instructor.
She oversee the development of the professional development curriculum for the school. She shares her insights about emerging web and social media trends on collegewebeditor.com, a popular and independent blog launched in February 2005. She also authors the Internet Technologies column for University Business. Karine has presented on social media marketing, web analytics and online courses at leading higher ed conferences (CASE, American Marketing Association, EduComm, eduWeb, CUPRAP, HighEdWeb, PSEweb, UB Tech, etc.).