6 Ways to Start Using Snapchat in L&D

It’s hard to keep up with the plethora of applications available on the market, especially with the constant rise and fall in the tides of popularity. Snapchat, an image and video messaging application, has been around for nearly 5 years. Yet today, it’s more popular than ever. Yes, Snapchat is primarily used for social interactions, however, it has begun to carve out space within learning and development in an attempt to appeal and engage with generational learners, especially millennials.

As 21st century learners, millennials who are new to the workforce expect to learn a variety of applications and mediums. Yet, they still must be trained on workplace values, processes, and organization that are often not in the form of a messaging application. With 100 million daily active users and 8 billion daily video views, Snapchat shouldn’t be immediately ruled out of your L&D strategy. Many L&D professionals have found the application to innovate blended learning techniques.

Still not sold? Here are 6 ways to start using Snapchat in L&D content strategies:

1. Brand the Class

Snapchat is wildly popular among brands. Diverse organizations are finding their own niche within the transient world of Snapchat. Retail brands like Ben & Jerry’s (benandjerrys), philanthropy groups like charity: water (charitywater), and even professional sports organizations like the NBA (nba) use the social application to reach fans and patrons alike. At the center of it, your L&D strategy is very much like a brand itself. You train, connect and interact with learners in a style unique and conducive to that of your own learning and development brand.

What’s clearly prevalent with the growing momentum of branding and Snapchat is the application’s capability to act like an informal slideshow presentation. Snapchat stories allow users to string together pictures and videos (of up to 10 seconds in length) into a single “story” with a 24-hour expiration. Often it is these stories that repeatedly deliver an organization’s core values over a variety of contexts. Likewise, learning objectives and content from an L&D course can be infused into a Snapchat story. NPR catalogued the success one adjunct professor, Michael Britt, had in using Snapchat to push knowledge to students in his intro to psychology course. His students found it easier to process and retain information because Britt’s stories provided learnable moments.

L&D professionals can create similar styled stories that pertain to the course and corporate objectives in their own training or teaching style. If you’re training a group of young corporate learners who are new to the organization, one option is to create Snapchat stories that apply learning objectives to tangible situations. This could be a series of videos where senior employees demonstrate core values in the workplace, snippets of different departmental levels, or a picture of some real customers using your company’s service or product. Where applicable, learners can see glimpses of your brand at work.

2. Create On demand Training Scenarios

On demand learning is a byproduct of Snapchat. Snapchat provides the capability for immediate sharing and consumption between instructor and learner, withal making the information presented more accessible and convenient. As JD’s Just Curious Blog points out, because of Snapchat’s “right here, right now nature,” Snapchat exchanges more closely mirror real life interactions. The benefits of this are two-fold:  L&D professionals don’t need to add in any editing fluff; learners have a heightened sense of a sharing purpose because the learning is directed at them.  

Because of its everyday, natural perception, learners will be more open to microlearning through bite-sized videos and content presented on Snapchat. This opens the gates to on demand training scenarios that eliminate any awkward or pressured situations that may arise from in-person sessions. For example, you can create a short video story where you are roleplaying a customer in a stressful situation asking a customer service representative for help. Learners would then have to send back their response. In this particular example, the customer service reps must keep their answers brief but appropriate to meet the maximum 10 second Snapchat video limit. With these situations, learners and instructors can get as creative as they like for different roles and departments.

3. Use Snapcodes to Increase Learner Engagement

Snapcodes are incredibly useful tools for blended L&D curriculums. They allow anyone with Snapchat installed on their mobile device to scan your custom snapcode. Doing so will prompt them to follow your account, enabling them to get notifications every time you upload new content to Snapchat for your learners.

Snapcodes are automatically created and located within any Snapchat account. They are found in the center of the screen by clicking the ghost icon. Advertisers have begun to use Snapcodes in print ads, flyers, and even billboards.  Add your Snapcode to your

Not a graphic design expert? Many companies, like Snaptag Stickers, create low-cost stickers of your Snapcode for you to on the cover a manual, binder, or other course documents that will gain the interest of your learners.

4. Humanize Yourself as an Instructor

For some people, the idea of linking their social accounts to their careers is met with hesitancy and skepticism. With Snapchat, everything you post is private until you add a contact to your Snapchat list. This means that you can dedicate a social channel to L&D without pushing content out to everyone in your network unlike Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Snapchat is an opportunity to portray your unique personality and humanize yourself. Like being the new kid in school, millennials are frequently nervous when beginning their first entry-level job. Their overall lack of experience and professional unfamiliarity can make them feel intimidated by the workings of an organization. The more learners perceive you as real and human, the faster the wall of intimidation will break down and a natural learning environment will grow.

Additionally, it’s becoming increasingly vital to building a rapport with younger employees. As eLearning Industry highlights, millennials are the largest percentage of the workforce and will account for 75 percent of the workforce by 2025. If you can’t communicate with them candidly, how can you truly train them? With the inability to edit videos on Snapchat, learners will be more relaxed with a video that communicates relevant messages over highly edited effects.

5. Keep Learning Connected

Providing learners with consistent L&D content can increase retention. Snapchat makes it easy to regularly push out content to your audience. Since Snapchat closely mirrors real life, you can create stories that employ L&D throughout the organization. For example, you could:

• Show sneak peeks and teasers for upcoming L&D material
• Provide a behind the scenes look at different departments or roles
• Celebrate team members for their achievements
• Put learning to the test with competitions and contests

Snapchat is an application that can take L&D outside of corporate training and into real situations across the organization. It also functions as a way to connect learners with experienced employees. Likewise, it piques interest with glimpses into what the next bout of learning will be like for them, what roles they may hold in the future, and spurs the competitive spirit.

This also provides the capability to monitor what content is performing best. When you post Snapchat stories, you can see who viewed what part of your story. Let’s say you have 8 clips where you take viewers to different departments, and on the fourth clip you begin to see viewership wane. Maybe learners don’t find this type of content engaging or important enough to finish the story. Sometimes just seeing the number of views isn’t enough to keep learning connected. You may want to consider an application that uses annotations to improve content. Annotations take communication beyond mere messaging because all of the learners and instructors can collaborate together instead of a 1:1 interaction like Snapchat.

6. Foster Ongoing Training

One of the many roadblocks L&D professionals run into is delivering ongoing effective training. After onboarding, it’s harder to hold the interest of younger employees because they typically feel more of an obligation to attack their workloads than to attend an L&D session. Snapchat can function to foster ongoing training for learners. One way of increasing interest is through learning previews. A Snapchat story can highlight the L&D content learners can expect in an upcoming lunch and learn. If they find that it’s old hat, they can choose not to come. Or if they are enticed by the story, it may push them to attend to learn more.

While Snapchat does have many benefits for L&D, it does have its shortcomings. Most organizations have mandatory training videos that must be shown to new hires – think along the lines of safety and confidentiality. When it comes to delivering digital content and measuring engagement, you may want to consider an application that enables an enterprise-wide blended approach.