Snapchat: An Emerging Platform for Teamwork and Collaboration

Guest Post by Karen Freberg

Snapchat has become one of the most popular and talked about platforms for 2016. Even during the Super Bowl, we saw brands such as Marriott, Amazon, and even Gatorade jump on board, with ads just on Snapchat. In addition, there are other brands that advertised during football’s biggest night that you may want to check out.

While Snapchat has been used for brands and other public relations campaigns, it can be used for collaborative and teamwork efforts as well. In fact, I used Snapchat for the first time this semester to not only showcase what I am doing in my classes, but also to document, share, and collaborate with my students and fellow PR professors on projects and assignments.

Here are some ideas to consider for how to use Snapchat for collaboration and teamwork feedback:

1. Providing feedback in a visual way.

Instead of writing an email, you can record a video, write some comments and notes on the snap, and send it directly to the person via a private snap. Some of your employees or interns may be more visual in nature and like information that is short and concise, so this may be a good platform to use. They are most likely using this already with their friends and consuming content from brands, so they can get some experience using this platform professionally.

Feedback can range from presentations, proposals, and even homework assignments for class.

2. Visual Chat session

Snapchat allows you to send both public snaps (through your story) and private snaps (one-to-one or one-to-many) at a time. This can be a useful platform to engage audiences and answer questions for a virtual chat session.

For example, if you are hosting a Twitter chat and you want to get questions to the guests ahead of time, you can collaborate with them. I did this last month for my class due to a snow storm we had in Louisville, and it went very well.

3. Customer Service

Snapchat can be used as a customer service tool to provide visual, engaging, and mobile feedback to individual users. We usually think of Twitter and Facebook as being the primary platforms used to engage customers, but you may want to have a Snapchat plan in place as well, just in case you need to answer questions and comments both internally and externally. Along with customer service, there have been agencies that have used Snapchat as a recruiting tool as well as for HR purposes.

4. Team Story

One of the things I think Gary Vaynerchuk does a great job of is that he allows his team at VaynerMedia to showcase their team on a day-to-day basis. They showcase each employee, what they are working on for the day, and their own point of view of the day. This gives audiences who consume and engage with this type of content a different perspective; it appears more transparent and relatable.

When hiring for future employees, this may be something to keep in mind as a potential recruiting tool to build on your current team. There are other agencies that are doing this on Snapchat; check them out.

If you’re interested in learning more about Snapchat, make sure to follow Delmondo for updated posts on the platform. Here are some additional links to other Snapchat resources:

• Mashable: Guide to Snapchat
• Cision: 5 things you need to know about Snapchat
• SproutSocial: Snapchat Marketing Guide
• Edelman PR: 5 reasons why you need to pay attention to Snapchat
• Gary Vaynerchuk: The Snap Generation
• Delmondo: Primer for Snapchat Analytics
• Waxing UnLyrical: How to Measure PR and Marketing Outcomes on Snapchat

How have you used Snapchat for teamwork and collaboration? Please share in the comments below. 

Karen Freberg is an assistant professor in Strategic Communications at the University of Louisville. She is also an adjunct faculty member for the West Virginia University IMC Graduate Online program. Freberg has presented at several U.S. and international research conferences, including ones in Australia, Brazil, China, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and The Netherlands.