Snapchat is one of those hot of-the moment social media apps that many marketers still aren’t convinced how they can take advantage, or how it could be useful to their brands yet. But marketers should take the time to get to know Snapchat because it’s a great way to excel your brand into a new generation, and all it takes is to create a Snapchat account, filter or lens.
To get started, let’s address the “what is it?” question.
What is Snapchat?
Snapchat is a social messaging app where users can send images to other users. With these images, a user can: attach a geographical tag of a current location; send short videos; and write a short blurb on top of the image or video you wish to send. These images and messages can be sent to several users at once and can be sent to last between one and ten seconds. After that, the image is gone.
Another feature is the Story and News sections. The content for each of these features disappears after 24 hours. People keep coming back to use the app because it also encourages people to become part of a “Snap Streak” with fellow users, (the number of times you snap images to a user), as well as unlocking new features on the app itself.
How Snapchat Can Promote Your Brand
Now, let’s discuss how Snapchat can benefit your brand; one of the most recent trends is creating a lens promoting a certain product or brand. For example: a company can create a lens of a new movie being released, such as “Marvel Avengers,” for example. The lens could have imagery of the “Marvel Avengers” title, a tagline, and a small graphic. The middle of the screen would be blank where a person could capture himself or herself within a selfie. How fun is that? You’re now on a movie poster that you can send to your friends while helping the Marvel brand promote their movie.
According to Bloomberg Technology, Snapchat has a reported 150 million daily active users meaning millions of users snap themselves onto these filters or lenses and share them with their friends, who share with their friends daily. This kind of sharing is fun for users, and garners great reach for the brand, especially if a lens becomes viral.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that these lenses come at a pretty hefty price. According to AdWeek’s article, “Not Just Silly Kid Stuff”, The Peanuts Movie filter that was posted on Halloween day for 24 hours, cost $750,000. That’s fairly unobtainable for most of us.
For smaller brands hopping on the Snapchat trend might not be realistic yet. Tim Villlanueva, head of media partnerships at Fetch, questioned if costs will drop significantly enough for smaller brands stating, “Our concern is how do you scale this? It’s going to be difficult to manage it in-house but [Snapchat is] pretty bent on doing that still, and they’re not worried about scalability issues.”
The high prices work better for those brands in entertainment and film that have large budgets, but for smaller brands it could be a bit of a squeeze. Let’s hope smaller brands will get their chance to get in on the Snapchat trend soon!
Sources:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-02/snapchat-passes-twitter-in-daily-usage
“Not Just Silly Kid Stuff” AdWeek. July 11, 2016.
