Snapchat is no longer a mere photo-messaging platform for idle teenagers; it’s a powerful marketing tool for retailers, a strategic branding method for celebrities, a megaphone for messaging for politicians and startups. And Snapchat’s latest adoption base? Colleges.
Last December, the University of Wisconsin Green Bay announced that, under a new social-media strategy, admitted students in its next class would receive their “acceptance letters” via Snapchat. (They’d still get physical letters in the mail at some point afterward, just in case of phone glitches or faulty fingers.) This week, Staffordshire University in the UK also announced Snapchat acceptances for some students. “We know that applicants may be worried about speaking to someone over the phone, from past experience of students saying they’d rather speak to us online,” Staffordshire’s social-media officer Laura Allen told Mashable.
Other universities, while not taking things quite that far, have lured their students onto Snapchat to make unofficial campus guides, deliver in-the-moment news, and solicit selfies taken at school activities for promotional material. It’s all in the interest of trying to become more relatable and modern to today’s tech-savvy students. Whether centuries-old universities can really change all that quickly at their core, of course, is another matter.