Benchmarking Snapchat Geofilters at Career Fairs (and in Higher Ed)
Fellow higher education social media marketers: When a new social media platform is all the buzz, what do you do? Create an account and try to gain followers right away? Wait to see if the platform sticks around long enough to be worth your while? In higher ed, our undergraduate “customers” are unique in that each year we consistently have around a 25% turnover, a new class of students in and a current class of students becoming alumni. And now, our undergraduates: the millennials we’ve come to know and love, are becoming Gen Z! How do we keep up and stay relevant?
How to engage with the nation’s newest generation
Here is the geofilter we used for Snapchat on Spring Career Fair Day!
Meet them where they are. Snapchat has been a debated topic at Career Center marketing conferences for the last few years. Many students are using it above Facebook and other social media channels that used to be popular, but is it appropriate for a career center’s messaging, and more importantly, do students want to hear from us there?
After a thoughtful review of Snapchats pros and cons, Babson’s Hoffman Family Undergraduate Center for Career Development decided to purchase and pilot a geofilter for our Spring Career Fair.
Some background
We decided not to create our own Snapchat account, as we’re still not convinced that Snapchat is a longterm, appropriate channel to reach our students. It seems a better fit to drive awareness and excitement about our office at big events. Therefore, Spring Career Fair Day worked well for our pilot.
Additionally, our office has been using the branding “Get up. Dress up. Show up.” How perfect for branding our Spring Career Fair in Snapchat!
Why a geofilter?
It’s visual, and put our CCD brand into Snapchat (where the students already are) to help create awareness of the fair from the morning of until a few hours after. Students would be able to use it across campus that day, which would be a great branding opportunity for the fair and for our office in general. We’d get analytics to see how many times the filter was both used and viewed, and then we could use that to determine if it’s a channel we’d want to pursue further.
Finally, it’s a new channel that we haven’t tried yet… so we’re thinking, why not?!
The results
This is the most important part: would we see a positive ROI?
Below are our geofilter’s results for Babson’s Spring Career Fair on February 28 from 2PM to 5PM:
Start Time: February 28, 2018 7AM EST
Date Ending: February 28, 2018 6PM EST
Cost: $184.60 USD
Area Covered: 3,968,249 Sq Ft (the entire campus)
| Date | Swipes (how many times the filter was seen in snaps being created) | Uses (how many times the filter was sent to a friend or added to a story) | Views (how many times the filter was seen in a sent snap or a story) | Reach (number of unique Snapchatters that viewed the filter) | Use Rate (how often the filter was chosen to use in a snap) | Swipe Time (average amount of time users spent looking at filter) |
| 2/28/2018 | 578 | 74 | 601 | 792 | 12.80% (74/578) | 7.5 |
With a population of around 2,300 undergraduates, the results at first sight look great. We reached 792 unique Snapchatters (hopefully students) that day! However, without having previous Babson Career Fair data to compare to, it’s hard to say how our results fared overall. Researching online for a good benchmark, I didn’t find much about Higher Ed, or Career Fair-specific data either. So I seek your help! Have you tried a Snapchat geofilter? Please share your results and we can create our own Snapchat benchmarks for geofilter success in Higher Ed.
In hindsight:
The pros:
- It was very easy! We submitted for the filter, expecting it to take up to 1 week to be approved and it was approved the same day.
- Qualitative feedback from the students was very positive.
The cons:
- There is a monetary cost.
- Difficult to see if there was a positive ROI.
About Babson College
Babson College is the educator, convener, and thought leader for Entrepreneurship of All Kinds®. The top-ranked college for entrepreneurship education, Babson is a dynamic living and learning laboratory where students, faculty, and staff work together to address the real-world problems of business and society. We prepare the entrepreneurial leaders our world needs most: those with strong functional knowledge and the skills and vision to navigate change, accommodate ambiguity, surmount complexity, and motivate teams in a common purpose to make a difference in the world, and have an impact on organizations of all sizes and types. As we have for nearly a half-century, Babson continues to advance Entrepreneurial Thought & Action® as the most positive force on the planet for generating sustainable economic and social value.