By now we should have all heard about Snapchat. The popular social platform released in 2011, is the key to unlocking the heart of our younger generation. Rivaling other social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram, it’s now vital to ask the question, how can my business utilise Snapchat effectively?
For those of you who are still wondering what on earth we’re talking about, Snapchat is a social messaging app with a photo and video format. With a ten second time limit, you can send photos alongside short messages, drawings and fun filters to your friends. If you choose to, you can also add these photos to your ‘Snapchat Story’ which lasts 24 hours and people can view your photos as many times as they wish within this time limit. One of the key selling features of Snapchat is the fact that once these time limits are up, the image deletes itself forever.
Focusing on 13 – 24 year olds, Snapchat provides businesses with the ideal opportunity to reach out to a younger, more receptive audience and with merely 2% of businesses using this application for marketing purposes, you’d have much less competition than the more mainstream sites. Nevertheless, there are a couple of rules we suggest you follow to ensure successful snapping.
Scrap self-promotion – Until you’ve built up a strong following and have provided snaps of value to your audience, people will not want to be put under pressure by promotional adverts. Despite the lack of businesses currently using Snapchat, there are still 7 billion video views per day so like every other social media site, it is important to add a call to action once you’ve formed a solid network.
Snap sparingly – Let’s use the well fitting quote, ‘quality over quantity.’ Providing valuable content suited to your audience will encourage engagement. With no need to snap at prime viewing times due to the fact that any photos you send out remain unopened until your audience are ready to view them, Snapchat is a convenient way of interacting with your audience on a more personal level. With Snapchat one of the best ways to build up a social network is through word of mouth, if you can provide followers with suitable and engaging substance they will then promote you to their own followers and so on.
Be concise – As the name suggests, the posts are designed to be short, snappy and interesting to read. Unlike most social media platforms you only have up to 10 seconds to get your message across, however with this being said the risk of missing what the snap says means you have the viewers undivided attention. One way that big brands get over this ten second limit is with their snapchat stories, see some creative examples below:
This example from GrubHub uses the ‘Snapchat story’ feature to include fun images that ultimately lead users to promo-codes for their services. This encourages their audience to interact with them and the simplicity means that this is an effortless and amusing form of publicity.
The brand ‘Free People‘ use their ‘Snapchat story’ to provide their 
audience with a sneak peek into new collections and behind the scenes extras. This is easy enough to do for any business, talks with staff members regarding the inspiration behind your company, provide tours of the office, anything that allows your audience to feel included.
The Association of Surfing Professionals includes constant updates of real time big events alongside some of the more well-known within the industry sending autographed snaps, something which is not only ideal for a specific audience, but is something that will gain them a lot of attention from potential followers.
When uploading to your story as demonstrated above, you have the ability to see how many views each snap has. This will show you if any viewers have dropped out halfway through your story, make note of this and think about why this may be.
Last but not least,
Good luck and happy snapping!
