Great Social Media Idea: Snapchat for Admissions

Hello! Is it me you're looking for? With my lack of posting this week, I bet you've been wondering where I am and wondering what I'm doing, but please... no need to sculpt my head in clay.

Fact of the matter is, I'm still recovering from Saturday, when RiKickulous - my kickball team (yes, I'm one of those *really* cool people who plays on an adult kickball team) - made a glorious, if unexpected, run into the semifinals of our league's spring tournament. It was pretty darn awesome and we nearly made the championship game (1-0 loss... tragic), but my body needed way more time than I care to admit to fully recover. That, or I've just been lazy. (Hint... it's the latter, though the former is also sad but true.)

ANYWAY... I've got a nice stack of idea in my suggestion box, and I'm happy to start sharing them. First up is Texas Tech University's use of Snapchat for admissions.

Really you should just read this article to get a full understanding of what Texas Tech is doing, but in a nutshell - they asked admitted students to send them a selfie via Snapchat, and they returned the selfia (again, via Snapchat) with some Texas Tech school spirit graphics added on.

Here's a choice quote from the article:

“Jamie Hansard, director of recruitment and marketing for Undergraduate Admissions, said the department’s goal was to engage admitted students in a fun, interactive way, encouraging them to enroll at Texas Tech for the fall. Social media provides a better forum for such interaction than emails or letters.

“While we send multiple communications throughout the recruitment cycle, this campaign is sent to students at the end of the recruitment year to capture their enthusiasm,” she said. “Although social media continues to evolve and we utilize most social media platforms, Snapchat is the most popular with this class.”

It also gave admitted students a chance to interact with potential classmates, find roommates and learn about students who will be part of the Class of 2019. This makes students feel more a part of the university before setting foot on campus.”

I have definitely found that - more and more - admitted students are looking to connect with each other prior to coming to campus as freshman. I was particularly amazed by a thread in the UP admitted student Facebook group (totally organized by the students, by the way... not me), in which someone asked for people to share their Instagram profiles and something like 50-75 students readily did so. Not to mention the now daily introductory posts that are happening in that group ("Hi, I'm Joe from Portland, I like baseball, Prince, Dr. Pepper, and occasionally posting on my lame blog about social media use in higher ed." etc etc). 

Seeing all of that happening on Facebook and Instagram, I'm very interested to hear someone say that Snapchat has been the most popular way to connect with admitted students. Makes me think that my long reluctance to launch a UP Snapchat account - mainly for bandwidth issues (social media isn't a full-time gig for me), but also partly because I'm old and this modern world frightens and confuses me - is going to necessarily come to an end very soon. I can only bear missing out on such a big opportunity for so long, and clearly Snapchat has entrenched itself and isn't going anywhere any time soon.

Great stuff, Texas Tech!