Instagram Direct or Snapchat?

Instagram recently introduce Instagram Direct, their new feature to send disappearing photos and videos to groups or friends within the app. As you may recall, this feature is very similar to the original premise of Snapchat. Snapchat began as an app to send disappearing photos and videos to friends, before later incorporating the concept of Stories. Instagram has introduced these components in reverse order, continuing their insistence to look strikingly similar to Snapchat.

From my early experiments with Instagram Direct, you cannot choose the length of the photo you set as your Story or send to a friend. In Snapchat, you're able to choose it's length between 1 and 10 seconds. This is frustrating if you're sending a photo to a friend that requires them to look a bit longer. Several friends responded that they didn't have enough time to see an Instagram Direct photo I sent them.

While the lack of time length control is frustrating, the ability to send to groups is convenient within Instagram. You can develop groups of people to send photos or videos to, which are saved and only require one click to later send to that same group. You can also send a snap to multiple people in Snapchat, but those recipients have to be selected individually each time.

The ability to send content directly to individuals or groups may not directly influence your social media strategy at a higher education institution, but it's definitely something to consider as you analyze how your audience uses both apps. Where do you want them to view your university's content (most likely in the Stories feature of both apps)?

Social Analytics Platform Review

When I was shopping and pricing various analytic platforms a year ago, many of the top brands such as Brand Watch and Hootsuite quoted me with enterprise accounts for at least $12,000/year. I don't know about you, but our university doesn't have that kind of money to spend on one platform for only a year! We ended up going with Sprout Social last year, which ended up being about $89/month. It had some positive features to it, but we still couldn't do some things as effectively as we wanted, for example, monitoring was not easy in Sprout Social.  This year, the University of Nebraska system has a system-wide Hootsuite Enterprise account, meaning each individual using the account is a single seat as part of the the overall system's account.

The streams in Hootsuite are very useful to monitor many accounts and search queries at once. This allows you to monitor other campus accounts, in attention to mentions, and listen to social posts from certain locations, and hashtags. You can like, retweet, or respond to any of these posts directly in Hootsuite. The streams may be my favorite part of Hootsuite! You're also able to publish and schedule content here as well.

The campaigns have been great as well, as it enables us to create a number of different social features such as curated content streams or contests. These can be displayed or a variety of platforms, from embedded on a website as we have here: unmc.edu/iamunmc, to a big screen at a graduation ceremony.

The analytics and insights offered from Hootsuite are very in-depth as well, giving us a great look at our metrics across a variety of platforms. You can download customized reports as well detailing whatever data you wish. I would definitely recommend the platform to any institution, especially if you can obtain it for your who system and have several users split the cost.