Catrin Lewis
5 min read
For the past 10 years, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have ruled the roost when it comes to the social media playing field. However, it seems there’s a new kid on the block who’s causing quite a stir and boosting brand engagement in ways we’ve never seen. Facebook has already picked up on the potential of this contender, and it’s reported that it offered $3 billion dollars, an offer which Snapchat refused.
In case you’re not familiar with Snapchat, it’s a mobile messaging app that allows you to send videos and pictures to an audience which last for only 24 hours. You can add captions, graphics, logos and all sorts to your content which makes it really fun to use and you can choose to share your content with the world or just your followers.
That’s just part of the reason is has more than 60 million users globally.
So it was an easy decision to try it out at Reward Gateway. And we’ve since welcomed it with open arms. We’re already big fans of video, and Snapchat would allow me to make our videos more accessible, keep announcements in real-time and make them easily shareable.
It took about 2 minutes to set up an account and in the space of 24 hours we had 37% of our workforce following our account. I was buzzing.
The great thing about it was that we’d now be able to connect our audience all across the globe to realtime, ‘day in the life of’ action. It allowed me to give our employees a peek into what was happening that day and make them feel part of it. The instantaneous, live updates connected our audience to the content in a way we’d not been able to authentically achieve before.
Since the content has an expiration date of just 24 hours it’s a great way to create a sense of urgency and play to the Millennials FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) mentality. They’ll be sure to come back daily to see what’s the latest. So how'd we do it? Read on ...
The Snapchat introduction:
Though Reward Gateway is largely made up of millenials, we want to make sure social media adoption reaches across all our demographics. That's why I'm excited to see that Snapchat has appealed to a much wider audience than you might think.
I handed over our Snapchat account to Digital Product Manager Phil Noble to demonstrate a product launch (more on that on the blog soon!) during our quarterly global update, got our CEO to give live updates to the staff and have since seen our engagement and numbers grow. (In fact, Glenn now uses Snapchat every day!)
Leading up to the quarterly meeting, I sent out reminders and even a quick video to help prompt people to sign up for Snapchat. To grow our following the day-of, we hosted a giveaway for an iPad, available only to those who followed our corporate account on Snapchat.
Having seven offices across the globe, it can be tough to stay connected beyond our quarterly updates. Snapchat proved to be the missing link for my coworkers to understand the ins and outs of daily life among our 330 employees.
So by the end of our global meeting, everyone at least knew we had a Snapchat account. And nearly 40 percent had signed up. But that wasn’t enough for me.
How we're upping our Snapchat game:
The next thing that I did was decide to hand over the account to our employees. I gave them the keys to our Snapchat and gave them free reign to create any content they wished on the account that would show our employees exactly what a day in the life of them looked like. Now, I’m sure you might think this is too wild, too crazy to work at your company, but hear me out. It's all about trusting your employees, and our culture is big on trust.
A takeover session is currently proving very popular with brand audiences. Everyone is doing it. They allow an influencer/other users to create content for their account for a period of time, creating their own story for that day, or week and the user sends all their followers/friends there as they follow their activity.
The simple interface of Snapchat means it’s really easy for everyone to start using. We didn’t require any communications to explain how to use it, we just had to direct the staff there, then sit back and watch the engagement grow.
We began with Rade Georgiev, our web producer in our Macedonian office, taking it over for a week, introducing us to the office and new team members there. He was given one rule only – make sure you do one post a day that tells us more about the team in Macedonia. We’ve since had our Birmingham team takeover introducing themselves and giving us a tour of their brand new office and keeping us up to date with their office move. And next week we’ve got Dominic Taylor from our Consultancy team showing us a day in his life as he travels the country meeting our clients.
Pretty soon it’ll be my turn to have a slot on the take over and I can’t wait to started. I’ve got plans to Snapchat our summer bbq social, take some behind the scene snaps of our Global Briefing being recorded in our studio, give people a look into our communications team meeting and lots more.
Want a peek at our internal Snapchat account? Tweet at us @RewardGateway and we’ll let you know where to find us. If you've been using Snapchat as part of your corporate communications strategy, I'd love to hear about it!