Last week I discovered yet another proof point that Snapchat can be effective for B2B companies. It is not suitable for all types of social media activity; at least not yet. The Philips Lighting Snapchat channel started out as a pilot and went live later on. Getting started with Snapchat was not easy but we developed a tracking procedure so that we could generate our own statistics as the platform does not supply them. Analytics is a crucial component to decide how successful a pilot is. In this case both the content and statistics disappear after 24 hours.

 

Could Snapchat be useful for B2B companies?

I decided to run a Snapchat activity for four days composed of short video interviews with various members of staff at the Philips Lighting (now Signify) headquarters building in Eindhoven. These were completely unrehearsed. Most people who I asked at random were happy to do the video that day. Some were able to film straight away without hesitation.  The video format of Snapchat supports a ten second duration, so I asked the interviewees to do two videos. The first one would be a video introduction. The second one would be open for them to describe something they were proud of or something they loved doing as a part of their job at Philips Lighting (now Signify). How would the videos perform?

What better way to give a peek into how it is like to work at a company. Glossy videos made by actors are often expensive but short social media videos made by real employees have the potential to express far more than a thousand words could ever do from a recruitment or brand web site, especially for B2B companies.

"Short #socialmedia videos made by real employees expressing far more than a 1000 words" Share on X

 

The Preparation For The Snapchat Videos

I made two social media posts from my own accounts and boosted the tweet with a small nominal amount. This was a nice warm up for the rest of the four days, and it was made after the first two interviews.

 

3 Amazing Results From B2B Snapchat In 4 Days

Here are three amazing results from the four days of interviews:

• A reach of 700,000 from organic posts made to support the activity which were posted in LinkedIn, Facebook, X (Twitter) and Instagram, which were shared and commented on by our followers.

• Our Snapchat channel gained sixty new followers within the four days.

• We had contact in Snapchat and LinkedIn from people wanting to know how they could work for Philips lighting after watching the interviews.

  
  

 The Social Media video Interviewees

 

Here are the most popular words from the supporting social media posts about the videos. The posts were made in LinkedIn, Facebook, X (Twitter) and Instagram. One of the posts in LinkedIn had a reach of over 35,000 with several hundred clicks and engagements.

We learnt a lot over the four days and had some super comments as feedback not only in Snapchat but also in the other channels. Here is a comment from LinkedIn:

 

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