Last week, the #UMSocial team came up with the idea to create an interactive Snapchat story. This 5 piece creative story crowdsourced user generated content by encouraging followers to respond with the words of “Hail to the Victors.”  Before we unveiled the story, we had no idea what to expect. We have never created a story as interactive as this one so the possibilities were endless. The instructions were rather ambiguous, but the idea was clear. After we snapped our followers the word “hail”, we expected them to send us the rest of the words to the fight song. Our favorites would be posted to keep the story going. When we received a submission 30 seconds after sending out the story, we were happy that our followers were interested and understood their task.  Our “Hail to the Victors” Snapchat story was a complete success! We were quickly getting views, and each word to our story.   Unfortunately, two hours into the story, Snapchat crashed. We would like to think that the story was so popular that it shut down Snapchat. At first, we were disappointed that this interruption was happening in the middle of our story. However, we soon realized that it would give all of our followers who were not caught up with where we were in the song (he/she is obviously not a true Michigan fan) a chance to catch up and submit more content. After being shut down for an hour, Snapchat revived itself and flooded our inbox with snaps. We had a very high level of activity once it started back up. Again, this validated the success of our story.

A few quick stats from our 5 hour campaign:

• Over 150 total submissions
• Gained close to 100 new followers
• Most snaps in the story had over 1000 views, all had over 700 views.

The #UMSocial team is excited to take this experience and learn from it. The success of this story opens up a variety of new ways to interact with followers. This “Hail to the Victors” Snapchat story shows that wherever they are, Michigan fans really do, always Go Blue!