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We can all probably agree that higher education shouldn't be afraid of Snapchat. However, that doesn't make it an easy platform for higher education marketing and communications teams.
Compared to more desktop-oriented apps/sites like Twitter and Facebook, Snapchat has always been a bit of a challenge for comms managers. While it's easy to create snaps and post to daily stories on Snapchat, the ability to capture useful analytics, manage crowdsourced content, and access snaps via a desktop interface has not been an option...until now.
Founded in 2014 in New Zealand (Kia ora, Aotearoa!), Mish Guru provides Snapchat analytics and content management solutions.
When I first read the "Snapchat Secrets" post on the University of Glasgow Social Media blog I was already aware of the existence of a magical Snapchat dashboard from Mish Guru because Daniel Marrable had given me a heads-up about its existence. However, I had no idea at the time about the capabilities of said dashboard. What I read in Marrable's post about Mish Guru was truly amazing:
Since signing up with Mish Guru we’ve been able to to see that in the past month we’ve had over a million views on our snaps, we’ve been able to monitor and save all snaps sent directly to our account (including video) and re-post them. With the option of uploading content we’ve also been able create high quality fit for purpose pictures and videos, and schedule them to be posted at a specific time to correspond with events (I know, I know…but there’s more). We also don’t need to give out our Snapchat password for student takeovers! We simply ask Mish Guru to automatically forward snaps from certain accounts directly onto our story.
First of all, Mish Guru is web-based. This means that higher education marketers can use the Mish Guru dashboard for “uploads, scheduling, data capture and re-posting, as well as full analytics tracking for any Snapchat account.” Essentially, it creates opportunities for seriously sophisticated uses of Snapchat.
Plus, I've spoken with Mish Guru and their prices are quite reasonable for higher education institutions. It's more than my monthly coffee budget, but it's definitely at a price point that should be agreeable to most universities and colleges.
While it doesn't include every single university/college Snapchat username, the Snapchat Directory from CASE shows that there is an increasing number of higher education institutions using Snapchat for marketing, communications, and engagement.
And, prior to a Snapchat Dashboard solution like Mish Guru, every single institution on Snapchat had access to very meager analytics. User engagement data matters. Analytics provide marketers with needed insight into what's working with their users. Mish Guru provides “account metrics in real-time, including followers, received snaps, story views, screenshots and engagement.”
Current Mish Guru higher education clients include: University of Glasgow, New York University, Georgetown University, Duke University, University of Melbourne (posting in 2014, they were the first Australian university on Snapchat), and the University of Canterbury.
Are you using Snapchat for student engagement at your university? If not, you should be. It's like the early days of Twitter and Facebook, except nowadays, everyone knows the value of using social media to enhance the student experience.
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