SnapChat Early Adopters in #highered: University of New Hampshire (@UofNH)

As I explained in the 1st post of this series, SnapChat is really starting to look like a serious contender in the game of communication platforms with college students.

Is it time to adopt SnapChat for higher ed institutions?

As you know, we can learn a lot from the experience of early adopters of any new technology, channel or platform in higher education.

That’s the reason for this series of interviews from early adopters of SnapChat in higher education.

After Nikki Sunstrum from UM, Jason Boucher, Social Media Manager at the University of New Hampshire, has accepted to answer my questions about his experience with SnapChat.

1) When did you start using Snapchat at UNH and what was your goal?

We began using Snapchat in September 2014.

We wanted to have a more personal communication with both our students and admitted students.

We knew how popular Snapchat was with those 25 years old and younger and that it had 100 million average monthly users. It was an audience we had not connected with as of yet… We wanted to create engagement that spanned beyond just comments.

Snapchat aggregates content and makes it easy for followers to share and view “Our Story.”

2) Why did you add Snapchat to your social media toolbox?

We post engaging content across many social media platforms and we use Snapchat to collect content from students and then share.

Instead of pushing out content, Snapchat allows content to come to us from across campus!

We have had even more success since launching the UNH specific geofilter. Students have been telling us how much they like it (both through Snapchat and through other social media channels) as well as consistently using it in their stories and snaps, which only helps UNH extend its reach across social media and helps promote the school.

We use the “My Story” feature in Snapchat to communicate and share with our followers.

Each time a new follower is added, we send an animated GIF (#UNHSocial) snap back! Snapchat is used to engage students on a more personal level – their daily stories on Snapchat are their daily lives that they’ve chosen to share with us!

3) What results did you get? What was the feedback from students?

Since we’ve promoted Snapchat via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, we’ve doubled our followers and increased our Snapchat score. Not only are students adding us as a friend, but they personally “snap” back to us on a regular basis.

4) How do you use or plan to use these connections going forward?

We plan to use our connections going forward to promote events (athletics events, lectures, curtailment, news, memes, fun photos, contest…) on campus and as a way of pushing information to our stakeholders, in this case students and those admitted.

Stay tuned

In the next post in this SnapChat series, I’ll share another of the 6 interviews I conducted with higher ed professionals using SnapChat with college students.