Snapchat has become a creative way for businesses to connect with their audiences, giving them a more personable and fun appearance.
What is Snapchat?
Snapchat is a social media platform that allows users to share videos and photos with each other either privately through its chat feature, or publicly through ‘Stories’. Your stories will vanish after 24 hours, allowing you to keep your story as up to date as possible, whereas chat conversations will stay there until opened and then delete automatically. With over 100 million daily active users – a number which is gradually growing – there’s a very large chance that a percentage of your audience are using the platform daily (source: https://blog.hootsuite.com). Snapchat allows your audience to keep up to date with you and your business in a creative way, allowing you to add filters such as colour, drawing, the weather, speed and more.
Why is Snapchat great for business?
Unlike Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms, people are very acceptant – and in some cases expectant – of you to share lots of content throughout the day ; many people enjoy being able to open their Snapchat and see as many story updates as possible. This is ideal for every business that likes to keep their clients as in the loop as possible, while trying to show a more human side. It helps your audience feel included and as though they are important to you.
If you’re a business that has a lot activity happening in a regular working day, Snapchat is the ideal network to share these activities. There are a number of happenings that you could share on Snapchat – new things added to your menu, setting up for a big event, attending an event and actual events happening for your business are just some things that you could be posting to keep your audience’s attention. However, when posting these exciting updates, you should keep in mind that over 70% of Snapchat users are under the age of 34 (source: http://www.thelasthurdle.co.uk). This means that the things you are posting should be appealing and exciting for that age range. Due to this, you also need to consider if it’s a network that your audience are going to be using and whether or not it’s a viable marketing option.
Snapchat Stories
Snapchat Stories are all the photos and videos you post throughout the day linked together in a ‘story’. Each separate post will be deleted after 24 hours, meaning there’s a good chance your viewers will see the stories you post. You can create story updates anytime through the day and will never have to take a forced break. Snapchat is always updating their filters from colour effects to the weather. Depending on your business, these could be some great tools to keep your snaps interesting and fun. One of the biggest main points of Snapchat: keep it fun and easy.
Another great update from Snapchat – you can now take photos from your gallery and post them to your story. Unlike before when you could only post the content you took then and there, you now get to use older images (possibly for a before and after, or if there is no connection you can keep for later).
Here are some examples of ways you could be using Snapchat to help your business grow yet keep it fun and easy:
- Take your customers and clients ‘behind the scenes’ of your business
- use the filters and edits to help show off a more personable side of your business
- Show your viewers the big events that your business may attend, present or set up
- Showing off the new things you have going on (whether this is something new to the menu or a new product)
- Announce contests and push incentives
- Your everyday life to help your customers and clients feel closer to you