How College Recruiters Are Using Snapchat, the App That Half of High Schoolers Use

Whitney Anderson’s colleagues were noticing something strange.

At promotional events, prospective students would walk up to Roanoke College’s booth, and, ignoring eager admissions officers, snap a picture of the college’s Snapchat information and walk away without another word. This didn’t mean they weren’t interested, said Ms. Anderson, Roanoke College’s internet communications manager. They were just trying to gather information by less traditional means.

“‘No, I don’t want to sign up for your list,’’" she said of their attitude. “‘No, I don’t want to talk to you on the phone. But yes, I will see what you have to say on Snapchat.’”

Snapchat, an app that allows users to share photos and video overlaid with text — messages that disappear to the user after a handful of seconds — feels more authentic to students trying grasp the reality of campus life. In a survey completed by Chegg Enrollment Services and Target X this year, 56 percent of high-school students reported using the app multiple times a day.

The seemingly disinterested student from the college fair, or her counterpart in another part of the country, might spend an hour later that night snapping back and forth with Jackson Steger, a Duke University junior and operator of the university’s Snapchat account, asking about his life as a student.

“High-school students are smart,” Mr. Steger said. “They know that an admissions officer is going to give a very formalized, sort of predetermined view of the university … a very, not biased, but rehearsed view of a college.”

As a member of the Devil’s Advocates, a group responsible for operating Duke’s student-led social-media platforms, part of Mr. Steger’s job is to answer questions from prospective students. They might ask him about the dorm rooms, or about off-campus apartment options. A singer might wonder what the campus a cappella group is like, he said, which would prompt him or one of his fellow group members to attend a rehearsal and send her some video so she could see for herself.

The appeal of using Snapchat to talk to real students makes sense to Ma’Ayan Plaut, the manager of social strategy and projects at Oberlin College. She’s worked in student-driven marketing since 2008, when she was a student herself, and said it’s a powerful force if colleges harness it correctly.

“Speaking to an admissions officer, you’ll get information about the school,” Ms. Plaut said. “You can ask very pointed questions, but if you’re asking about student life, you’re going to get a different perspective from someone who’s actually living that.”

Tricks and Strategies

College are still learning how to keep their Snapchats interesting.

West Virginia University launched its Snapchat account in August 2014, so officials have had time to learn some tricks — and accumulate 22,000 followers, according to Candace Nelson, the university’s social-media editor.

“Once Snapchat introduced the ‘stories’ feature, that’s when we really knew that, ‘Hey, there’s a place for business here,’” Ms. Nelson said. “The stories feature is really kind of the game-changer for higher ed.”

Here’s what she’s talking about: Snapchat has been around since 2011, but until October 2013, users could only send content back and forth to each other. There was no feature that allowed users to share something with all their followers, akin to posting a tweet or Facebook status. The stories feature changed that. Now content posted to a user’s story can be viewed by followers as many times as they want for 24 hours.

Ms. Nelson has now consulted with officials at dozens of other colleges, most recently Towson University, about starting their own accounts.

Snapchat “is about as close as you can get to actually being here,” Ms. Nelson said, and West Virginia’s social-media team work to make the best of that. Every Tuesday, they have a “takeover,” a day when accounts that are normally run by social-media officials are handed over to someone else, usually a student.

They also make use of “geofilters,” a Snapchat feature which allows users to add certain overlays to their photos, based on their location. Ms. Nelson just created geofilters for two locations in West Virginia where the university will be holding events for prospective students.

Mr. Steger, at Duke, also uses geofilters when they’re available, and he says he tries to take advantage of the multimedia aspect of Snapchat. He likes letting followers hear the roar of the crowd at a basketball game, or sending several “rapid fire” snaps to convey time passing, like plates going from full to empty at a trip to the dining hall.

“Snapchat, more than anything, really gives you an immersive element that allows you to show a very casual and silly side to student life,” Mr. Steger said. “It’s the most engaging platform.”

Roanoke College has more Snapchat followers than students.

The Virginia college has an enrollment of about 2,000 this fall, and that many people regularly view its Snapchat stories. Snapchat doesn’t provide exact numbers of followers, but Ms. Anderson, who manages the account, estimates it at about 5,000.

Roanoke has had its account for a year now and has already started to see the benefits of it. The Snapchat account regularly receives paragraph-long questions from prospective students, she said, and last winter, while students were interviewing for a fellows program, several of them mentioned unprompted that Snapchat had been the biggest factor in helping them decide which college to attend.

Doubts About Reach

But Michael Stoner, president of mStoner Inc., a marketing communications firm that works with higher education, says admissions officers may be overestimating Snapchat’s reach. He says that adults, including those in higher education, “don’t necessarily understand how teens use social media, including Snapchat.”

Mr. Stoner and Gil Rogers, director of marketing and enrollment services at Chegg, published a paper last year, called “Mythbusting Admissions,” in which they examined how well teenagers’ behavior matched up with recruiters’ perceptions. Among the data they reported: Seventy-nine percent of teens surveyed said they had never used Snapchat for college research, and an additional 7 percent said they used it only “every once in a while.” Yet 84 percent of admissions officers thought prospective students used it at least once in a while in the course of their college research.

“While I think that Snapchat is a valuable tool for institutions to use, it’s not clear to me that students they’re trying to reach are actually using it to do research on colleges,” Mr. Stoner said. “Paper brochures, conversations with parents and other influencers, all these resources are still important and still used more than Snapchat is being used.”

Still, one in five teens is still a big number, especially for a platform that’s only a few years old. Students who like it respond to Snapchat because it doesn’t feel forced, said Ms. Nelson, of West Virginia. “It’s really real. It’s not this kind of branded or polished or wrapped-in-a-package story,” she said. “We know with incoming classes, they don’t want to feel like they’re being hard-sold on anything. They want to see what it’s really like.”

Which is why student-driven marketing can be such a powerful tool, Ms. Plaut said. “It really comes down to what a student can bring that no other person can bring, when it comes to telling the story of the school,” she said. “It’s the realest voice.”