It’s the sort of app that can make you feel dated and confused, particularly if you’re on the wrong side of 30. Yet, for nearly 160 million teens and millennials who’re active every single day on Snapchat, posting photos and videos of lives mundane and extraordinary, the app is exploding in use, outpacing the sort of usage we’ve come to expect from twitter. With Snap Inc, as Snapchat’s parent company is known, preparing to go public with an IPO that pegs its value between $20-25 billion, it’s about time many grown-ups, marketers in particular, finally figure out the enigma that is Snapchat.
At its core, Snapchat is where the cool kids go to share and view pictures and videos of things they see or do, embellished often with text, stickers, doodles and even selfies with various masks and filters, courtesy the apps’s excellent facial tracking features. You take snaps, photos or videos up to 10-seconds long that you can either share with friends or followers or string into a collection, called a story. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, your snaps and stories (and chats for that matter) live for just 24 hours after which they disappear, a panacea to the Internet’s habit of never forgetting something you posted ages ago!
There’s also a complete lack of a social feedback or comments system — no likes, no comments whatsoever — so there isn’t that all-too-familiar race for likes and shares. Coupled with the short-lived nature of each snap, you’re afforded a far more authentic view into the lives of people you follow. It’s also what keeps users coming back every single day, so they don’t miss the goings-on in their network. So much so, Christopher Mims from the Wall Street Journal even likens Snapchat to television, in that viewing stories often feel like “the lean back experience of watching television, as opposed to the lean forward experience of engaging on social media”, a “reality TV, starring people you know.”
But really, why does Snapchat matter? For one, it’s got a big following in the urban millennial and post-millennial market, so if you cater to the consumers of the future, this is where they hang out. A more crucial metric to consider is engagement. Over 60 per cent of Snapchat’s daily users contribute an average of 9000 photos per second — that’s almost double the figure for regular contributors on Facebook, by some estimates!
Even if you include those folks who merely open the app to view content, they do so an average of 18 times a day and spend 25-30 minutes per day within the app watching 10 billion videos…each day! It’s these highly-engaged users who are far more likely to share and talk about your posts, products and campaigns outside the app.
Brands can pick from a variety of ad options, starting with snap ads — 10-second full-screen video ads with a linked call-to-action — and sponsored geofilters, which are photo effects and filters only available at select locations. You can even sponsor a lens, which lets Snapchatters play around with the interactive filters you’ve created. Taco Bell used this to great effect, and users took playful selfies that transformed their head into a giant taco.
Whatever you choose, the content must be cutting edge, relevant and relatable to a young audience, and because the platform has its own nuances, the creatives must be native to the Snapchat for them to work.
All said, Snapchat matters because it’s different, and if Snapchat isn’t part of your digital marketing strategy yet, why don’t you go ahead and install the app and see for yourself?
Guest Author
The author is Technology Columnist and Program Manager in Bengaluru, India
