Most companies know how effective social media can be when used properly in their marketing strategy. It’s free to set up an account, make posts, talk to your consumers, learn from them, seek out information about them, share moments from your office, and more.
If you want to take it a step further, you can start paying for ads to show to a wider audience or reach key groups. These are all tactics we’ve seen before. Every now and then you get a new tool to reach different audiences in different ways, and someone comes along, and does something very right!
Since SnapChat launched in September of 2011, it’s gained serious leverage in the social media market. The founders of SnapChat, Evan Spiegel & Bobby Murphy, saw that they had an incredible idea for a social media platform and they were prepared to take that idea far. While the other main three social media powerhouses — Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — all keep their user-generated-content available virtually forever, the idea for SnapChat was to have it so that the content on the app was to be similar to living real life: live a moment in the moment that it’s happening in, and you can’t go back and re-live it.2
The idea might’ve seemed farfetched at first, but you can’t really argue against an app that has a lifespan of only 4½ years, but already has over 100 million active users.3
Until recently, businesses didn’t see much of a reason to use SnapChat as other means of communication between them and their customers. Celebrities used it kind of like Twitter, as a sort of one-way communication with their fans, but how could businesses possibly use SnapChat to reach their customers?
This new feature by SnapChat was a door opening for editorial businesses like National Geographic and Vice to speak their customers. The best part about Discover was that these businesses could write articles and post them on Discover on their own terms, meaning that the user is not shown a certain article just because it has more likes or shares than another.4
Discover was just another step towards businesses seeing the value of SnapChat. One of our favourite uses of SnapChat advertising is the case of MeUndies. MeUndies decided that they would snap to their followers a special URL that could give the viewers access to a discount code at their online store. These snaps of the special discount URLs lead to a 10-12% increase in conversion rates during that time. Because of the quick nature of the promotion and SnapChat’s ingrained sense of urgency, customers were prompted to act quickly to make a purchase. We think that’s an amazing use of social media.1
So keep on using those social media outlets to make customers interactions fun and influential! It’s so important to stay relevant. Keep an eye on social media trends, and your key consumer demographics. If it suits your target audience and fits well into your marketing plan, use new platforms like SnapChat as another way to grasp your audience.
How often do you use SnapChat? Would you say it should be a staple social media platform for marketing departments at firms everywhere? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.
Sources: Marketing Land1, Growth Hackers2, Quora3 SnapChat Blog4
