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Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays were the biggest days for brands posting Snapchat Stories in Q4 2016, according to a Snaplytics report. Moving away from Saturday’s dominance in Q3, each of the three day accounted for 17 per cent of weekly posts, with brands posting 13 Stories per month on average.
The report studied 217,000 posts from 500 brands in Q4, including 24,180 Stories. The average number of ‘snaps’ per Story was 11.3 – another figure that has risen, from 10.7 in Q1.
This led to a drop in average completion rate for Stories, however, down from 93 per cent in Q1 to 88 per cent in Q4. The verticals performing best for completion rate are travel & leisure and advertising & marketing, both at 91 per cent. At the bottom of the list are fashion & lifestyle and beauty, at 85 per cent.
Video accounted for 61 per cent of the content posted by brands on Snapchat. Video’s share steadily increased across the course of the year, up from 56 per cent in Q1 – but it is still the minority for some verticals....
In fact, according to Edison Research, Snapchat is the most popular social media app among Americans ages 12-24. Believe it or not, Snapchat is a marketing gold mine. And you don’t have to be selling Hello Kitty in order to reap the rewards: currently, 150 million people use the app to watch 10 billion videos daily, and that number only continues to rise. In the same Edison study, researchers found that Snapchat had more users than LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. It took four years for Twitter to grow as much as Snapchat grew in just one year. In this post, I’m going to break down applicable methods for marketing on Snapchat. It’s time to kick your brand up a notch....
This article contains the best Snapchat tricks, tips, hacks, and advice to take your snaps to the next level. Celebrity snapchats are going to have nothing on you (with the exception of that whole fame thing)! If you want to crush it in the creativity department and become the envy of your snapchat friends or if you want a shot at showing up when people start looking for the best snapchats to follow then you’re definitely in the right place. Oh, and you’ll definitely find a few suggestions here you haven’t seen anywhere else yet. What you won’t find here are tricks to save on battery life or data usage (Snapchat is a hog), or ways to secure your Snapchat account (even though that’s very important) or shady things like how to take a screenshot without anyone knowing (don’t do that). Depending on who you are and how much you use the app, some of these suggestions may seem like awesome bolts of idea lightning and others might seem like common sense. In either case, there’s one thing to keep in mind which might give you an edge over other Snapchat users looking for tricks and tips as well: new tricks usually surface after each Snapchat update. So that’s the time to start looking for new ideas to maintain your creative edge (and we’ll try to post anything good right here to keep you up to speed)...
Snapchat is arguably the most popular social media app around. But if you’re one of those folks who’s downloaded it to your smartphone and you're still not quite sure what to do (and you don’t want to ask one of the teenagers you know), here’s a quick getting-started guide to show you the basics.
What is Snapchat?
One of the things that Snapchat is best known for is the ephemeral nature of the content - you take a photo or video and send it to a friend and they have a limited number of seconds (up to 10 seconds maximum) to view the content before it disappears.
Before you send your snap, you can mark it up with text, stickers, or special lenses that give your selfie a silly look (big cartoon eyes, puking rainbows… it sounds odd but quickly becomes strangely charming)....
Even though Snapchat is said to have over 150 million daily users, many are still at a loss for where the app fits into their marketing plan. Think for a moment about some of your most embarrassing moments. Perhaps you fell off of a chair in the middle of a painfully hip, packed restaurant (me). Maybe you fell asleep in the middle of a meeting and got called out by your coworkers (me). Perchance you were at a professional development event at a colleague’s family cabin and broke the host’s hammock (spoiler alert: me). Whatever your most cringe-worthy moments, I bet you wish they could disappear forever after 10 seconds. This is what sets Snapchat apart. While it can’t erase embarrassing memories from your life, Snapchat’s fleeting nature has been both a blessing and a curse for brands using the image-sharing platform. With the maximum lifespan of a Snap being 24 hours, businesses and brands have had to approach marketing differently on the platform. To help you navigate these uncharted waters, we asked our community for their top Snapchat questions and answered them below....
Snapchat is now known as a platform for individuals and brands -- one that allows users to create quick, lighthearted, and even educational video content without using valuable production resources. For brands, this means a new opportunity to show off their culture, share knowledge, and connect with their audience in a new and exciting way. After reporting more than 100 million daily active users, and over 8 billion video views a day, we decided to give it a go: The official HubSpot Snapchat account launched in March 2016. And while we're still getting our feet wet, we've already learned a lot about executing and iterating a successful Snapchat business strategy. To help you get started, we've detailed everything we've learned (so far) below. We'll start by going over the basics -- how to set up an account, create a Snap, leverage effects, etc. -- and jump into some tips after that. ...
Wondering how to use Snapchat for your business?
Want to create deeper connections with your followers?
Snapchat can help you build an engaged following, increase loyalty, and boost your brand visibility.
In this article, you’ll discover 10 ways to use Snapchat for business.
If your company is still trying to figure out how to make the most of Facebook and Twitter, consider:
- WhatsApp has rapidly become the biggest messaging service in the world with more than a billion users.
- Snapchat is a juggernaut with the 18-24 age group, now earning more daily check-ins than Facebook. The company founder insists it is “not a social network.”
- Facebook is the social network for most of the world, yet their major investment is in the development of private Facebook Messenger, including bots that would help companies scale “human” interaction through the service. More than 900 million people use Messenger now. Other private messaging services like Viber and Kik have attracted millions of users.
Of the Fortune 100 companies, 77 use Slack. The average Slack user keeps the app running 10 hours a day, and is actively using it for over 2 hours a day. Instagram started private DM in 2014 that focuses on the sharing of content with up to 15 people in a threaded approach. Twitter has experimented with Snapchat-style doodles and photo editing and in 2015 expanded the character limit via private direct messaging.
The movement of consumers from public social media to private messaging has been so rapid that Business Insider reported that the combined usage of the top four messaging apps now exceeds the combined usage of the top four social media apps. Falling data prices, cheaper devices, and improved features are helping propel this growth....
This kind of à la carte, short-form video content takes advantage of vertical's power. Successful videos on Snapchat turn the constraints of vertical into strengths. "Our viewers prefer vertical," Snapchat's head of content, Nick Bell, told USAToday last year. "We've seen a 9 times higher engagement rate with vertical rather than horizontal video." The right mix garners video completions for National Geographic With its rich, image-focused legacy, National Geographic might not be the first brand you'd expect to embrace vertical. Yet it already offers a mix of short-form video, articles and photo-driven stories about travel and adventure on Snapchat Discover. In fact, vertical can work even better for mountainscapes and animal close-ups—a short video of a baby sloth has been a major hit. As National Geographic social media vp Raj Mody told The Los Angeles Times: "From day one, we saw this as a great way to reach new young audiences and advance our mission. We definitely think it's showing promise."
Tal Chalozin, co-founder and CTO of video platform Innovid, finds Snapchat's video views and user engagement to be extremely high. He recommends publishers look at the completion rate to gauge impact, adding that many Snapchat videos are achieving 90 percent completion rates or above. "Snapchat is redefining the word premium," says Chalozin. "People are willing to give their time to watch, regardless of the production value. But that specific term—completion rate—can be a great gauge for quality."...
“Fundamentally, Snapchat is a bit of a confusing platform to use,” says Paul, “Snapchat has lots of hidden tricks and tools; obviously, the platform is constantly evolving with the Lens[es] that seem to change every day, and the Discovery channels — to say nothing of the paid products that are constantly changing.” Paul says that for his team, Snapchat is about inventing completely new processes, new measurements and new benchmarks. Along with Thompson and Paul, we asked National Geographic’s VP of social media, Rajiv Mody, and Taco Bell’s social media lead, Ryan Rimsnider, how their brands are taking advantage of the platform — from what they’ve learned since joining to all the ways they are having fun with their Snapchat followers. Here’s what they had to say....
Every day, Snapchat gets 100 million visitors. That means more people will use the app today than the total populations of California, New York, and Texas combined. One hundred million users is the kind of number that can seduce any marketer. But jumping onto the platform without a strategy or some boundaries is a sure-fire way to lose the respect of both your audience and your marketing team. In order to connect with viewers, drive ROI, and—let’s be honest—have some fun, your first step should be to understand the platform’s best practices. Here are four examples of brands that have mastered Snapchat....
Snapchat has become one of the most popular and talked about platforms for 2016. Even during the Super Bowl, we saw brands such as Marriott, Amazon, and even Gatorade jump on board, with ads just on Snapchat. In addition, there areother brands that advertised during football’s biggest night that you may want to check out.
While Snapchat has been used for brands and other public relations campaigns, it can be used for collaborative and teamwork efforts as well. In fact, I used Snapchat for the first time this semester to not only showcase what I am doing in my classes, but also to document, share, and collaborate with my students and fellow PR professors on projects and assignments.
Here are some ideas to consider for how to use Snapchat for collaboration and teamwork feedback:...
Have you heard of Snapchat?
Want to use it to connect with your customers?
Snapchat is a mobile app that lets you send public or private snaps of images and video to people from your smartphone.
In this article, you’ll discover how to use Snapchat‘s features to connect with your customers....
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Snaps – 10-second videos or pictures shot on the app – are an effective and expedite way to incentivize customers and humanize a business, in addition to communicating brand initiatives and values. Small businesses all over the globe are fast capitalizing on Snapchat to elicit actions from their Snapchat followers and heighten brand awareness. If you’re a creative small business aspiring to reach a younger audience, Great! Here are 4 reasons why SMBs prefer adding Snapchat to their marketing mix over other social media channels:...
Wondering how to get more value from your Snapchat content?
Want to learn how to reuse your Snapchat stories?
You can get a bigger return on your Snapchat marketing efforts by downloading and repurposing your stories.
In this article, you’ll discover how to repurpose your Snapchat stories for other social media platforms.
One of my fellow grad students tweeted that back on August 6, in the wake of Instagram cloning Snapchat’s features with their Stories function. "The early numbers suggest another reality: Snapchat is here to stay."
Now we have numbers to show that this loyal sentiment is common among Snapchat’s core users. BuzzFeed news reporter Alex Kantrowitz recently shared data from third party providers that “did not find any meaningful decline” in Snapchat’s metrics after the launch of Mark Zuckerberg’s latest attempt to challenge the king of ephemeral messaging.
“So for those who were quick to deem Instagram Stories a Snapchat killer, the early results suggest it may be wise to reconsider that label,” Kantrowitz wrote....
Snapchat on Wednesday unveiled Snapchat Memories, a new feature that lets users save and share snaps and other photos and video that they have saved to their phones. While some said Memories would make Snapchat more addictiveand others fretted that it would ruin the app’s spontaneity, the new functionality will also likely change how news organizations use the app. With Memories, users can save snaps and then edit and resend them to other users or add them to their Snapchat Story. Users can also now upload photos and video that they’ve shot outside of Snapchat. However, saved photos and videos that are uploaded as stories or snaps have a timestamp to show when they were originally taken. Users can access Memories by swiping up from the camera section of the app....
Snapchat, the one-to-one messaging app with more than 150 million daily active users, has earned a reputation for fast growth and innovation. But despite its success, it isn't the most user-friendly app I've ever played around with. Many of its best features are so buried within the app that a lot of people don't even know they exist. In March 2016, Snapchat added even more features in their release of a new version, and some of these features have totally reshaped how people use the app in the first place. For example, did you know that you can use Snapchat to make a live video call? Or that you can add emojis to your Snapchat videos -- and make it so they move and scale with specific objects? What about the trick where you can save data by turning the app on to "travel mode"? There are a whole lot of cool things you can do with Snapchat that you may not have known about. But before we jump into them, it's important that you know the basics. Already have the basics down? Read on for some more advanced tips and features. Note: Before getting started, make sure you're operating on the latest version of Snapchat. At the time of posting, the latest version is 9.33.0.0....
Snapchat is no longer just a private messaging tool for kids. Snapchat is a news platform, and it’s a platform for more than just the 20 media companies with precious spots in Discover, Snapchat’s dedicated professional media channel. Media companies big and small are using the Snapchat Stories feature, which allows you to create longer videos by piecing together photos and individual videos, each up to 10 seconds long. How Media Companies Are Using Stories Companies like The Hill and the Washington Post are using Snapchat Stories to cover political rallies; companies like The Skimm, Real Simple Magazine, CNBC, and CBS News are giving behind-the-scenes looks at their operations; and companies such as Mic, The Verge, and the Moscow outlet In the Now are using it to distribute original stories created just for Snapchat. And there’s a lot of crossover—most of the media companies I follow are still experimenting and have done all of these things and more. As social media strategist Barbara Kolbe Baker noted recently on her “Snaps by the Pond” channel, Stories have been so successful that they’re the target of Snapchat’s new ad rollout: Starting this week, advertisers can now buy ads between individual users’ Stories instead of being limited strictly to Snapchat Discover....
Snapchat combines the best of social networks, magazines, and television in a redesign of its omni-entertainment app.
You’ll now see image and headline previews of the content inside Discover channels and Live stories on the Stories page, instead of just logos for the publishers or events they capture. The Discover page now features a Pinterest-style mason grid of tiles, while the Stories page now combines the two rows of static Discover channels and Live Stories into one scrollable row of non-friend content.
Also, instead of having to dig your favorite Discover channels out of the whole list, you can now tap-and-hold to subscribe to them so they always appear amongst the Recent Stories from accounts you’ve added, unless you later unsubscribe. This gives publishers like Tastemade and IGN an extra call to action to bake into their Discover channels and marketing.
The goal here is to make professionally-made and community-curated content just as attractive as what friends share on the app. Previously, Discover channels felt bolted on to the experience, and can seem overly polished compared to Stories from friends that are fascinating despite flaws. VentureBeat and Recode previously reported that changes to the Discover page were coming....
Five years on, it's clear that Snapchat wasn't a gimmick. The company was recently valued at $16 billion and now has more than 100 million daily users who spend an average of half an hour on the app every day. And it's not just teens who love Snapchat. Although the service still skews toward the millennial set—60% of all 13- to 34-year-old smartphone users are on the platform—14% of Snapchat's user base is over 35. The fact that you know a snap is going to disappear makes you want to pay more attention to what you're watching. All of this results in 10 billion video views every single day. Many are personal messages sent and received between individuals, but these days, media companies and brands are competing for users' eyeballs as well. It might seem counterproductive for a company to invest in creating content that will be gone after 24 hours, but according to Bob Wolfley, who runs social media at the underwear company MeUndies, the fleetingness of these videos makes users more likely to be actively engaged with them. "We've been so trained by the constant rush of content on all these other social media networks that we mindlessly cycle through it to kill time," he says. "The fact that you know a snap is going to disappear makes you want to pay more attention to what you're watching. Snapchat does not have metrics for companies to track how effective their snaps have been for driving traffic and generating sales, but the brands Fast Company interviewed say that they have done their own little experiments. MeUndies, for instance, which has been on Snapchat for two years, has used a variety of methods to see how the audience is engaging with the brand. Wolfley has created vanity URLs to track if followers were going from Snapchat to the MeUndies website and has also launched several hidden sales campaigns to determine how many users used a specific promotion code. He is now convinced that Snapchat is the most impactful channel for introducing users to the brand and then getting them to make purchases. "We're getting more bang for our buck per follower than any other social media network," he says....
Back in 2011, Snapchat was synonymous with risqué teen behavior. News coverage repeatedly warned parents of the damaging effects the platform might have, and as a result, the success trajectory wasn't looking good.
Since then, Snapchat has evolved into something so much more. And while it's certainly not the cornerstone of every marketing strategy just yet, the channel has earned a reputation for fast growth and innovation. Snapchat is now known as a platform for individuals and brands -- one that allows users to create quick, lighthearted, and even educational video content without using valuable production resources. For brands, this means a new opportunity to show off their culture, share knowledge, and connect with their audience in a new and exciting way.
After reporting more than 100 million daily active users, and over 8 billion video views a day, we decided to give it a go: The official HubSpot Snapchat account launched in March 2016. And while we're still getting our feet wet, we've already learned a lot about executing and iterating a successful Snapchat business strategy....
For the first time since Facebook unseated MySpace in the hearts and minds of teens, ladies and gentlemen, we have a new social media champion — Snapchat, at least if you’re a young American (cue David Bowie). While Facebook continues to dominate overall social media usage, in a new report from Edison Research, Snapchat has eclipsed Facebook with social media users aged 12-24. In fact, 72 percent of them now use Snapchat and 26 percent cited this as the channel they use most often, up from 15 percent just a year ago, a mind-blowing statistic. At the same time, Facebook dropped from 43 percent to 32 percent as the most-used network for that age group.This new report prompted a fascinating discussion with Tom Webster...
But while Snapchat was once solely the province of teens and early adopters, typically employed as a fun messaging tool, it has also uncovered a genuine opportunity for enterprise use in more recent years. Savvy companies are beginning to discover how messaging apps can be used as powerful marketing tools, and Snapchat has risen to the top of the heap, thanks to its unique features and sprawling reach across an audience of Millennials. Just like many other successful brands, you can put the distinctive features and benefits of Snapchat to use for your organization, allowing you to connect with a new segment of customers without having to spend an exorbitant amount on a new marketing campaign....
Snapchat could be used by over 1 billion daily active users in time and substantially accelerate how many videos and photos people share and consume. But there’s more to be done and questions to be answered.
Even Twitter’s massive growth excitement for years was characterized by the challenge of finding mass sustained appeal — “Why say what I had for lunch?” Now, Snapchat’s massive growth with millions of passionate users is characterized by some persistent user misunderstanding of Snapchat use cases — some ask, “Why show something I did if it gets deleted?” And there are unexplored adaptations to broaden the appeal of Snapchat Stories and strengthen chat....
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