Looking into the future of social media marketing for Extension events, programs and educational opportunities, Extension educators must seek innovative strategies beyond the posts shared by staff and faculty. To engage, inform and excite audiences, Extension professionals need to seek strategies that promote user-generated content. Supporting user-generated content is a highly effective marketing strategy and lends itself to creating more trustworthy content.
One platform that promotes user-generated content is Snapchat. The integrated features within the Snapchat social media app make it one of the most popular platforms used by millennials and Generation Z users in communicating and sharing content with their peers. These integrated features include geofilters, which are themed graphics that overlay photographs and are available for users' physical locations.
The availability of geofilters for Extension events enables clientele to be digital advocates for Extension while sharing “snaps” with their contacts. The marketing approach of offering geofilters for Extension events not only increases user-generated content but also makes Extension events more digitally accessible.
In 2017, a cross-disciplinary innovation team in the Oregon State University Extension Service formed to support the use of Snapchat geofilters to market and promote 4-H/Extension events. To enable Extension personnel to request Snapchat geofilters to "flight" at their local 4-H/Extension events, the innovation team developed a web-based submission form. "Flight a geofilter" is terminology used in delineating the area a geofilter covers and the duration the geofilter is available for the selected area.
To encourage participation, the team presented the opportunity to flight Snapchat geofilters to OSU Extension personnel through multiple in-state peer-reviewed presentations, concise and timely emails, and infographics mailed to each county Extension office.
When a geofilter was requested, a member of the innovation team developed a personalized filter at no cost to the requester. The filters were co-branded following OSU brand guidelines and were flighted during the time and at the location of the requester's event. After each event, a member of the innovation team followed up with the requester by providing Snapchat analytics for the filter. This allowed requesters to see how their audiences/clientele responded to using the filters and the impacts of making the filters available to event goers.
Over the course of the 18-month project, 95 geofilters were flighted. Of those, 80 filters were created internally and co-branded by the innovation team at no cost. The remaining 15 filters were developed through the use of a free template provided by the National 4-H Council. The cost to flight all 95 geofilters was $4,750. The filters were viewed more than a million times.
The most valuable outcome of the project was the ability to provide OSU Extension faculty with county-specific results. A personalized geofilter was flighted at all 36 Oregon county fairs in 2018. The resulting data allow OSU Extension faculty to make informed decisions about continuing to support use of Snapchat geofilters.
The innovation team published the results of the project in the Journal of Extension.