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Let's snap it

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Let's snap it
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How organisations can use Snapchat
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46
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188
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CC Attribution - ShareAlike 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor and the work or content is shared also in adapted form only under the conditions of this
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It gets more and more difficult to inform young people about politics via traditional media. Snapchat is the fastest growing social platform among millennials. In particular in Europe Snapchat is acquiring more users. Germany is among the top 10 countries with the highest share of Snapchat users worldwide. How can political organisations use Snapchat? What content should they post? How can new accounts be promoted? A short presentations about organisations that already use Snapchat successfully to inform young people about politics.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Yes, welcome to my talk. I'm like so many people. I didn't expect that, actually. So it's nice that you all came. I will quickly start, because there's a lot to tell and only 30 minutes time. So maybe first a few numbers, like 2 million users worldwide, 35 million users in Europe, and 2.5 in Germany.
So Snapchat's growing really fast. And there's more and more video views each day, especially in Ireland, Belgium, but also Germany and the Scandinavian countries it's growing. But the most important fact, actually, about Snapchat is that it's one of the youngest social networks in terms
of the age of the users. 71% of its users are under 25. And that's really interesting, because the other social networks, they don't have these numbers. And that's also interesting for politics, because to reach out to this young audience,
like the people between 13 and 25, it's not easy nowadays with the traditional media. And that's why I think, especially for political organization, it's interesting to use Snapchat and to reach out to these young future voters, maybe. So a bit about my talk, like maybe a bit before on me
myself, I was working for the social media team in the European Parliament for two and a half years. And last year, we came to Republica as well. And I tried the app a bit out here. And afterwards, we decided that we would start our own Snapchat account. And this is one year ago.
And now, the Snapchat account of the European Parliament has 15,000 followers. So it was a success, we would say. Of course, there are other stars that have a lot of more followers. But in terms of political communication, we said that it's a success.
Maybe I'll explain a bit what this talk is not about. Like, I won't explain the app or how it works, because I think there's a lot of useful guides out there that explain how you can do a Snapchat story or other things. And why I said for political organizations, I think actually that political organizations, they
are a bit special, because they are not like a company. There's not a lot of money behind often. And also, they have to report back to the hierarchy. And they have to make sure that their communication is in line with the communication of the other parts. So first, I will bring some examples. Actually, I brought one, of course,
from the European Parliament, one from the United Nations, and one from the White House. And in my presentation, you have a lot of examples from the European Parliament, because of course, I had the best access there. In general, the quality is quite bad, because it's like a mobile app.
So it's not recorded in HD or something like that. And then secondly, I will focus on practical advice, like how you can set up an account for political organizations, and how you can make the account a bit more known. And then the focus will a lot be on content, what kind of content you can publish
as a political organization. And if we still have time, of course, I'm here for questions. Maybe on content, because I just talked about it, I didn't say it. When I speak about content, I mainly speak about stories. Like, I think for political organization,
it makes most sense to post stories, like pictures and videos that you post and that are accessible for 24 hours. And on the app itself, I think the most important thing is to be creative, because it's a really young app, to experiment with it, when it's really personal, like the human face that you have it,
and it's really engaging and interactive. So coming to my first example now, the European Parliament. I can explain a bit how we did it, actually. We were a team of four or five people, and then once a week, we were sitting together and thinking, okay, which topics could be interesting for the audience?
And then we didn't pick every topic, but only the topics that were really interesting for people between 13 and 20 years old. And then we were not just picking the topics, but we were also thinking, how can we make them interesting for our audience? So often, we handcrafted something, we made something, we made pictures.
We always tried to have a very creative angle to show these topics. So I will show you one example now. This actually was on the budget of Erasmus, and as such, we think the budget is a really boring topic. That's why we picked the cake to show it a bit.
And then we had the looks prize, and afterwards, we also had something on radicalization. We worked a lot with quotes of members of the Parliament, and then in the end, we have climate change. You will see it now.
And we always put a link in the end as well. It's not possible to click on this link, and we, of course, cannot see how many people really went on this link to check out, but just to have our message set. And then another thing that's really important on Snapchat is behind-the-scenes content. So the Parliament was the ideal place, actually,
to show behind-the-scenes things, because there's happening a lot every day. So for this one, it was a plenary day. All the members of the Parliament were in the House, and I went into the plenary chamber, actually, to the very front, and I looked at the members and just mingled.
And what's interesting, what you should do also if you use it as a political organization, you should adapt a bit to the style. So here you see, we put the chair thing. That's really like paint something on the pictures. That's interesting. And the second thing is we have the filter as well.
After a short time, we said, okay, it would be cool to have a filter. And that's why we designed one for the Parliament and also for the Parliament in Strasbourg. And you can just hand them into Snapchat and then they make them available. So the second example would be the United Nations.
They went on Snapchat shortly afterwards in June 2015. And I picked two examples, actually, from the Paris Agreement that was signed a few days ago. And they also had a special filter that they used, of course, on this occasion to show what they are doing. And the second thing where I picked the second picture
is Leonardo DiCaprio and Ban Ki-moon. It's like celebrities on all social networks. They sell also on Snapchat. And what's, I think, interesting here, you see, when you do a Snapchat, you have to be really close. So probably the person doing the Snapchat was here and Leonardo DiCaprio there.
So that makes it, I think, really interesting for young people that you are with a Snapchat account so close to the people. And then they did also videos.
So little videos and the person explaining what's happening there. And that's, I said in the beginning, like Snapchat's really personal app. And this, like the concept, somebody explaining something and even maybe the face in the picture, not here but in other Snapchats, is really interesting and makes really
then also interesting for the audience to follow it. And the second thing is like, I picked here like a Snapchat. And this is interesting because the first thing you saw, they made a filter and you can make a screenshot of this filter. And then you can take a picture of something and put the filter on it.
So you, it's like very interactive. You can show them where is your favorite place on earth. The third example that I brought is the White House. They only went on Snapchat in January, 2016. And what I think is super interesting there
is that they are always so close to Barack Obama. Like here, he went to Saudi Arabia and they were present as well. And they pictured him a lot. And then they also work with filters. And I think this is why Snapchat is so interesting and why it's like such a good mix with politics. Because maybe these young people think our politics
as such is really boring. But with Snapchat, you can be so close to the people that do the politics that it gets interesting again. So that was actually on the examples. Now I come quickly to the setup.
I think the most important thing is the name. Like you should choose a name that everybody can remember. Otherwise, the most of the adding thing is over the ghost. So once you have decided for a name, you can make like a very creative icon. Like you just before saw the icon of the White House
and the European Parliament. So it's a bit difficult for political organizations because they don't have this one face that they can put there. But mostly it's buildings. But in any case, be creative, think of something cool and change it all from time to time. And then what's also important in the setup,
make sure that everybody can see your stories. Because you have to change that in the settings. Because the stories are the main part to communicate about. Yeah, and then how to make the account famous.
This is of course like one of the most important points. Like because on Facebook, it's like easy. It's really an open network. But on Snapchat, it's not too open. So the first point of course is like go on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram and YouTube and tell your followers there that you are now on Snapchat
and use your network there. Then the second thing you can do as well is like download your stories. For example, you can have a question in the first part of the stories and then upload it on another platform. For example, on Facebook or on Twitter. So followers have to go on Snapchat in order to get the answer to the story.
Then you can also change your profile pic. A lot of people do that at the moment. You can go to Facebook or to Twitter and make the little ghost icon for your profile. Actually that helped a lot for the European Parliament to get more followers.
And then you can also have on the website an icon not linking to the app itself because that's not possible. But linking to the website of Snapchat with your ghost so people can know how they find you. And then as on other social networks, you can always work with influencers. I mean, we had somebody explaining us Snapchat before.
It's very difficult to find out on Snapchat who's big but you can of course also work with other influencers. What we did in the Parliament once, there was a YouTube event so we spoke to the YouTubers and we had Melissa Lee from Breeding Unicorns
like talking on our Snapchat account. And this was really well perceived actually by the followers in Germany. And then of course you can try to get in one of the live stories from time to time. Snapchat has live stories like for really big events and you can just try to get your content in it
especially if you have it with a filter and show the people that you are on Snapchat and you have your own filter, this is then really cool. So that brings me to my next point, measurement which is like a weak point of the app I think for political organizations
because the measurement is quite difficult. You can see who and how many people saw you like one pic or one video of the story and you can see how many people took a screenshot but you cannot see more and also you cannot see how many friends you have. So what we did in the Parliament,
we assigned weeks to each team member and then they had to add people and they had to say how many they added and put it in Excel file to keep track on how many friends you have. And what we did as well like once we had a new follower
we were sending them one like snaps this one for example and this is really interactive and they really appreciated that we sent them a pic as soon as we added them. And then here this is quite an old one but I just put it in order to explain a bit what you can see in terms of statistics and what's interesting here
you can also see how many people skipped out so if you have a lot of skip outs you can see that maybe the topic wasn't interesting at all for your audience or the picture was too long or the video too long or too many talking people. And then what we did as well were like polls so we asked our audience are you for or against something
and this is on organic food we like do a picture like that and after the story was there for like 20 hours maybe we could see here how many screenshots were taken and we then told our audience like we did this poll on organic food and actually the majority is for or against it.
And then maybe on the app itself team use I already said we assigned a week and that was also due to the fact if you use it with several people it's a bit difficult because you can lock off the other person so if somebody is just recording a story
and your colleagues locks in this could pose a problem because then maybe your picture is lost because it locked you out so that's also why we did it that only one person is taking care of it. And in terms of measurement it's always good also like to download your story
for your archives or if you want to use them again. And on the app itself also weak point is that it needs a lot of battery and you mostly always need like an iPhone to do it otherwise it sometimes can pose really problems.
So coming to my next point interactivity as I already said like it's a really interactive application so I think it was quite positive what I really liked about Snapchat is like you get a lot of positive responses. So when I managed the Facebook account of the European Parliament there were so many negative like comments
but on Snapchat in the nine months that I did it I think I saw only three negative replies and mostly like there were a lot of positive replies. Mostly they said that they really like our snaps or the fact that we are on Snapchat as such.
Then we got a lot of questions on internships on the topics that we reported about we got journalistic requests and although a lot of times they wanted to know who's behind this account as I said it has like a really personal touch and a really human face so they wanted to know like who's answering them
so from time to time we've sent pictures from our team, the managers. And then the third thing some people that came to the parliament they also wanted to visit us or to meet us. So the first person that wanted to meet us was Anton from Sweden and we met him
and that's him. From Sweden, Parliament together with the European Parliament Snapchat team. And we spent one day with him we showed them around in the parliament we did a story on him and I think a lot of people saw that we really appreciate our fans
that we really come back to them and that we take them serious. So that was quite nice. Then the second thing that you see is Robert Schuman like we did a lot of quizzes as well like we were asking a bit funny things whose birthday is today and afterwards we put like the response as well. And then the last thing is also like interactive
it's a little video we did last summer and we were just asking the people how do you say summer in your language? And we always try to have a good mix between funny content and also serious content.
And what we did was the answers like it's not only that they send us the answers but we tried also like to show their answers.
So we used the second mobile phone and then we filmed what they send us and we put it again on Snapchat. So they really saw that we appreciated what they did. So now coming to my next point on content I already explained a lot of things
like for example, quiz we have the poll we have the chat that we never did but this something I could imagine could work really well you could ask the fans what do you want to know from this or this politician and then they could send you questions you can go there ask them the questions and put a little bit like behind the scenes content on it
and I could imagine that would work as well. Then what we did as well is the wrap up of the week that was like a concept that we developed along the way every Friday we did the wrap up of the week that's where we featured like four to six topics that are interesting for this audience we were thinking of creative way to show them
and we were sending it every Friday. And then of course like behind the scenes content is really important. And then maybe also like a few points in general on the content like we always tried that the pictures are not too long that we don't have too much text
I mean you can use a hack to put more text but don't overdo it that we use filters and lenses so like adapt also to your audience and do it like they do it so that they don't see you like of course they will always see from your content your political organization but don't do it in a very serious and boring way.
And then it's really important to record it always in vertical so that people don't have to move their mobile phone and we always try to post in the morning because it's proven that in school breaks there's a lot of like activity on Snapchat
and we did like stories three or four times a week. And then maybe on the length like we try to not to overdo it so our stories were never more than two minutes like we really try to be short. And then the last thing I just want to add is like be creative as I already said experiment, do what you think is cool.
So now I have some examples. Of course behind the scenes we had a lot of Schulz and Juncker. Then we had the three kings. Hello everybody. You know politics can be very cool. You don't believe it? Look at the website of the European Parliament.
And then we had Viviana Redding. So whenever we went on an interview we tried to bring the app as well and ask the politician for like a message to the young audience and that was Viviana Redding what she said. And on this picture it's interesting because it's especially the age group that we are aiming at. So once you tell them it's for Snapchat
they directly tell their friends, ah cool the European Parliament has Snapchat. And that's like some longer stories like that we did. This one is actually a story that we planned a bit with the interpreters unit.
Hello my name is Remantie. I work in the Latina booth. I interpret from English, French and Russian into Latina and I also do ritual into English. Hello I'm Lorenzo from the Italian booth. I work from English, Dutch, German, French and Slovenian into Italian. And then this story we tried
just to explain a bit how they work. Probably the last two most interesting persons I took honor to interpret were Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande. So we tried to explain their work and we spoke with them and let them do something so people get a real insight
what's happening in the European Parliament. So my job here is to listen in one language, analyze the information and then render it in a different language. So now it's your turn. How do you say I love language? I stop it here because I think time's also running out a bit. Then the wrap up we started it all
always with things like that. And in order to make it recognizable for the other people. And then the last one is actually a Snapchat story from COP21 where we went with a team and where we also tried to give some insight.
I can put it on. So we always try to show them what's happening behind the scene and what we are doing. That's it basically from my point. I don't know if we have any time left
but if yes we could have two questions. Not?
Yeah. Do you, I think you were one of the first and then I saw somebody there over there. So we have a lot of microphones in here. So if you have questions we have one, two, three hands raised. So I will start. So we start in the third row.
Hi. I wanted to know if you always translate what the people say. If you always write it down you did that when the people who translated the stuff you wrote down what they said. Do you always do that? So do you always, because some people don't turn on the volume
on their smartphones. Okay no we not always write what they are saying but we just give a little caption because a lot of people watch the snaps on mute so that they at least know a bit what's going on if they don't, cannot follow the tone. Okay we have room for two more questions.
Yeah hi. Okay hi. Are there legal obstacles you can stumble upon when putting content? Actually in the first nine months we didn't but there's of course a few questions for example what if you use a picture that has copyright and you did take a picture of it
or what if you use music that has a copyright on it and you feature a bit of that. I don't know if it's already solved but that's interesting questions. Okay one more question. We have one over there. Second mic. Yeah. Hello my question is did you manage
the terrorist crisis of Brussels? If yes how? If not how would you have done it? Actually I didn't but I was on the app when the things in Paris happened and what we did is we put a picture on from Scholz with a quote. Like I mean we were always like relying on the politicians at work for the organisation
and then we kept a bit calm but that's what we did on all social media. Also what they did after the Brussels attacks there were no tweets for one week from the European Parliament. Okay and one final question from the first row. Here, oh no, here. The first one you can make.
Thank you. In Dutch, English, English, I don't know. How you make the video cards. I saw it was a video and how you make it because if I use Snapchat today the first time I can't take a video from my gallery. I just can make it live. No that's what I explained.
You have to be on the spot so you make the video in the app, you put it on the story and then actually it's automatically made into one video when you don't know the story. So you cannot make any cards. Like it has to be directly this moment that you want to capture. Okay so you didn't cut it, you made it live and put it together. Yeah that's maybe the challenge.
You have to do everything live. Okay thank you. So if you take the wrong quote of Scholz you will have the wrong quote of Scholz. Okay. Okay thank you. And so the final question. You said that there are six people working on Snapchat for the European Parliament. Did you? It depends, it varies a lot. Like in the beginning we were two or three
and then we always try to get some people from the team and like depending what we are doing if we were acting a lot and we needed people to hold things more people were helping. But maybe three to five were in the core team and they were like brainstorming on topics and things like that. How did you manage to convince the people that pay you to give you that amount of personal
to do that because that's the biggest problem I always face. That they say social media I don't care or something like that. So how did you manage to convince them that this is important? I mean the social media unit of the European Parliament is really open to new things
and they have 15 different social networks and they are spreading the resources in all networks. So it was not such a problem. It was not like, it was not five persons working full time but it was five persons working maybe like half an hour or one hour a week on it.
Okay, thank you. Okay, that's it. Yeah. Thank you very much.