Should You Be Using Snapchat in Your Marketing?
I believe the answer is most definitely YES! Ever since rediscovering the mobile app I have been in love with it and the more I researched into it the more I found great ways to market using Snapchat. The purpose of this post is to bring you all that information into one place as I found a 5 Snapchat strategy guide here and 7 Snapchat Strategy guide there, I've been on webinars and watched youtube videos. Most of which go over the same information, however there would be an additional tip or two that I hadn't heard of yet. This is where you will find it all. Snapchat is a newer place to market your blog or business and there are new strategies being created every day. I will keep you up to date on the app changes and updates as well as new strategies I discover at my blog ChadFopma.com .
Here is why you should be using Snapchat in Your Marketing: You probably know that Snapchat is a mobile photo and video sharing social media platform, you add your photos or videos to your Snapchat Story. Snapchat was released in September 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown. Originally all the app provided was the ability for the user to "snap" a photo and add some text to it and then send it off to a friend. Entertaining but not too useful for us marketers. Now snapchat offers the combination of video and images that form your story. You can add text, filters, you can draw on your snaps and add emojis and other cartoon images into your snaps. When you combine all of this it makes for a fun experience for both you and your customers. Snapchat has 8 billion mobile videos viewed per day and 100 million daily active users as of May 2015. As you can see this is huge for marketing!
http://www.statista.com/topics/2882/snapchat/
As you can see from the diagram above, Snapchat is growing fast. If you have not yet set up a Snapchat account for yourself it's not that hard to do. If you have ever set up a social media profile you can definitely set up your Snapchat account, it's pretty much the same. If you would like some help check out this post over at WikiHow , they will show you exactly how to set up your new account. Go set up your account now if you haven't already.
The Basics of Snapchat: Snapchat is fairly easy to navigate and use but it will take time. Here are some great ways to cut down on the learning curve.
Taking Photo or Video in Snapchat It's not that hard but here is a depiction any way. It's just like taking a photo on your phone. Aim your phone at what you want to snap or record and press or hold down the button in the middle of your screen, I just figured out that you could also take a photo/video with the button on the side of your phone. For iphone users it's the volume buttons. To take a picture just press the photo button once, to record just hold that button down and you can record up to 10 seconds.
Setting the Time Limit of Your Snap For your snaps you can set the amount of seconds that picture is seen. This will come in handy for the different photos you take. Lets say you're taking a picture of what you're eating for dinner seeing that for 10 seconds is probably going to be too long, so maybe you want to go for 3 seconds instead. If you're doing a promotion and tell people to screenshot your next snap then you'll probably want a 10 second video so your viewers have time to snap the screen. You'll see something like this.
Where it says 10 in the lower left corner is what you'll tap to open this screen:
You'll then be able to choose how many seconds you want that snap to be seen.
Snapchat's Lower Tool Bar In this image, that you saw above, you'll notice that there are three other symbols.
The first one you can download the snap you just took straight to your camera roll.
The little box with the plus sign in it will add your last snap straight to your Snapchat story, which I'll cover a little later. The arrow in the lower right will allow you to save your snap to your story as well as send it directly to your friends.
You will be taken here where you can add to your story, a list of your friends will also be visible below your story. You can check the box of the friend you want to send a snap to.
Snapchat's Top Tool Bar
the "X" in the upper left corner will cancel your most recent snap, meaning if you don't like what you took a picture of or your video you can delete it by hitting that X. The folding piece of paper will take you to your stickers and emojis. There are a lot to choose from and you can have some fun with it for sure! You can place mulitple emojis into the same snap, resize them by spreading your fingers apart or pinching them together to make the emoji large or small. The "T" is the typing tool. When you tap this a little dark bar will appear on your screen and you can type about two lines of text. If you tap it again you will get large text left aligned and if you hit it one more time you'll get large text center aligned. It's really cool! The last one, the little pencil allows you to draw on your snaps.
Adding Friends Adding friends isn't too hard. First you want to tap on the Snapchat symbol at the top of your screen.
Once you hit that little yellow button you're going to see a screen like this.
If you know your friend's username you can add them that way, you can add friends from the address book in your phone and you can add by snap code. You'll see someone has changed their Facebook profile picture to their snap code, if you like what they share on their news feed and want to add them to Snapchat just take a picture of their snapcode with your phone and then tap "add by Snapcode". Snapchat will take you to your photos on your phone and then you just tap the image you just took and it will add that friend for you. It's pretty handy and I'll show you one of my secret weapons on how I add lots of people in my niche into Snapchat. If you want some more info on the basics of Snapchat check out Verizon's blog here . Snapchat Mastery also has a great post on getting started with Snapchat.
Implementing Snapchat Into Your Social Media Strategy One of the biggest benefits of Snapchat is the fact that what you post is raw, it's a behind the scenes look into your life. Although that might be scary, don't think about it. Think of Snapchat as your personal reality TV show. With Facebook, Instagram and Twitter you have the opportunity to make your videos and pictures and posts "perfect". With Snapchat you will be viewed as authentic, you can't edit your video or always take the perfect picture. Instead it's all on the go. Lets take a look at some ideas on how you can start marketing with Snapchat and some of the brands that are utilizing this platform.
Providing a Discount or Special Offer Since your Snapchat story will only be visible for 24 hours it's a great platform to have a limited time offer. These flash offers and discounts will get your viewers moving. If you're having a sale on an item throw it up on Snapchat and tell your viewers that the sale is going away that day, they have to use the special code you put in your snap in order to get the item at sale price. One example of a company using Snapchat for discounts is the frozen yogurt shop 16 Handles . In 2013, the company created a campaign for the New Year, which offered discounts for customers who sent a Snap of themselves enjoying 16 Handle’s yogurt.
Sprout Social
Changing Your Profile Pictures on Social Media and Letting People Know Your're on Snapchat. You may have seen this happening already but all across social media people are changing their profile pics to their Snapchat code. Neil Patel says that offering "private" content can help you get exposure on Snapchat. What I think he means by "private" content is the fact that you are sharing the behind the scenes look at what you're doing during your day, but don't just share your life, share immense value that your niche would find beneficial. You can do a search in your other social media platforms for something along the lines of "share your snap code" and you'll get results like this:
You can do the same on Twitter, this will help you find others to add as friends in Snapchat. When you begin adding people you can watch their snaps and they'll be able to see yours. Another awesome thing you can do is customize your snap code with an image and different colors. Neil Patel shares how you can do this in his blog post . Once you have a custom snap code with a different color background and maybe a picture of you brand or logo inside the little ghost share it like this guy above and tell people to join you over on Snapchat. DJ Kahled shares his "keys to success" on his Snapchat story. He talks about his story and inspirational messages. The exclusive content he shares has made his followers feel special and this has really helped him to grow his presence on Snapchat.
Giveaways Although this kind of falls in line with discounts and special offers you can also do giveaways. GrubHub has a great example of how you can do this. This app allows you to find local restaurants that you can pickup food from or have delivered. GrubHub launched a campaign close to march madness with their giveaway. Here's what it looked like:
Pretty cool right? It was all drawn with the art tool in Snapchat. Using these giveaways it's a great opportunity to engage with your audience. GrubHub responded back to the people that added them on
snapchat. This created huge engagement with their followers and a personal feeling for those who got responded to. You can let your creativity flow with Snapchat, really think about ways that you can create engagement and that personal experience.
Tell Stories Snapchat, if you haven't already figured out, is great for telling stories. Sapchat Mastery has a couple of really good posts on using story in Snapchat. You have to be a bit creative and do some experimenting with your snaps. The ultimate goal is to be sharing amazing value with those that follow you. Find creative ways that you can do this and implement it in with some of your life or behind the scenes snaps. Let people see you implementing the things that you teach in your snaps. If you shoot a video about setting goals shoot a video of you writing some goals and how you write your goals. Bam! Value! Make sure you have a beginning, middle and end to your stories. Shaun Ayala says: Below are 6 tips that I consider when creating my own stories, yes, you read correctly, I actually pre plan all my stories. I believe by planning your stories it allows you to brainstorm different ideas/scenarios that will in turn separate you from many other content creators and artists on the platform. Below is my personal list to good storytelling on snapchat. Here are my 6 tips: 1. Make it a “Story” 2. Make it Entertaining 3. Make it Interactive 4. Make it Engaging 5. Use the Snapchat Tools 6. Feature your Audience Pretty great right? Check out his blog, he's sharing lots of content on Snapchat. It's interesting to think about creating an actual story for your snaps, I'm going to have to play around with this. Making it interesting shouldn't be too hard. If you're sharing great tips or hacks that you've found you can make them entertaining through the filters or draw something up that goes with what you're sharing.
Making your snaps interactive by telling people to take a picture of something specific that you want them to do. Such as having them send you a snap of them writing a blog, if you're in the blogging arena, or Making your snaps engaging Shaun Ayala again creates engaging content on Snapchat by creating "games" in his post he tells about how he created a walking dead game where the viewer has to tap through his story in order to save him from the zombies. Pretty creative! In using the Snapchat tools you want to be in a place where you are sharing your doodles or adding emojis to your snaps. and you want to find a happy medium with this. Balancing everything out so that it comes together smoothly but you're not over doing it wither. And make sure that you're featuring your audience. Like mentioned above, if you have your audience sending you a snap of them writing a blog take a screen shot of their snap and then post that image on your story and thank them for their snap. This is huge!
Influencer Outreach and Takeover There are already a bunch of great influencers on Snapchat, we saw DJ Kahled earlier, Gary Vaynerchuck is on Snapchat and Tai Lopez to name a few. You would need to find some influencers in your niche that you could reach out to. This is more or less a paid strategy for Snapchat as there are not any paid advertising that you can use yet, although it is on the way. More likely than not you would need to offer payment to the influencer that you want to take over your Snapchat. You would create a unique password just for them and they would post value driven content for you. You would get huge exposure and more people would see you as an authority. You can also pay them to feature you with your snap code and have them recommend you on their social platforms. During the Reallife Sour Patch Kid Snapchat campaign: Logan Paul partnered with Sour Patch Kids, taking over their Snapchat account. He invited his 500,000+ Twitter followers to Snapchat to see the madness.
As per Digital Training Academy, Sour Patch Kids received 6.8 million Snapchat impressions and 120,000 new Snapchat followers through the campaign. That's huge! If you have the money and know a good influencer then this strategy is good for you!
The Nitty Gritty Snapchat Secrets and Strategies That Almost No One Knows About! Alright, I did find some of these on blogs, some I've discovered for myself but it took some real digging. What I share with you here are some advanced tool abilities, phone apps that I don't hear many people talking about yet, and some advanced strategies.
Snapchat's Advanced Tools 1. Changing Your Doodle Colors
melemon.com shares how they turn their doodles into black and white and other colors. To get white I just drag straight out to the left from the color scrub, to get black I go straight down from the color scrub. Pastels you'll go straight out to the left of whatever color you want. Also a nifty little trick is you can move up or down and it will change the color to whatever is above or below. Then you have the dark and light colors by dragging out and down for dark and out and up for light. This is something that I didn't know for a long time! I was so frustrated that I couldn't use black or white! My early drawings were pretty bad!
2.Snapchat's Geo Filters Something I didn't really cover above were the geofilters. After you take a snap, and before you send it off to your story you can swipe left or right on your screen and add geofilters. What they are is Snapchat will have predesigned filters that appear when you're at a certain location. If you're in a certain city or at a national monument there is probably a geofilter for it. It will usually say the name of the location that you're at with some sort of design around the text. They're really cool! There is a way that you can make your own geofilters too! If you head over to Snapchat.com they will explain how you can create a filter just for you and where you can get it approved. You cannot use branding in your geofilters and they go through about a 3 day approval process. The custom filters are perfect for an event you're attending or a location that you'll be at promoting your business. Just make sure that you have enough time to get your filter approved so that when it comes time for your event you have it ready to go and are not waiting on it.
Here are a couple examples of custom geofilters from Bamboolab . Hootsuite also shares how you can apply up to 3 different geofilters into one snap! After you have taken your snap swipe left or right and apply the first filter, then hold your finger down on your screen again and swipe with your other finger, this is going to apply your second filter to your snap, cool! Do this one more time and you can apply your third filter. That is really cool and can make for some really cool looking snaps!
3. Drawing in Better Detail Using the Zoom Feature There is a way that you can zoom in on your screen allowing you to get much more detail out of your drawings on Snapchat.
Here's how you can do this: On your iOS device go to your settings Select General go to Accessbility under the Vision setting select Zoom Select Show Controller On Android go to Settings Select Accessibility Go to Vision Tap Magnification Gestures Enable Zoom To activate this feature you will need to tap twice on your screen with three fingers and the window from above will appear. Once you have it you can drag it around your screen using the bubble at the bottom and then select your drawing tool and doodle away!
Advanced Snapchat Strategy How to Measure Your Results Measuring your success on social media can be tough at times, especially on the newer platforms. And currently, there aren’t any ways to get analytics or data around your Snapchat account. So when it comes to measurement on Snapchat, a little ingenuity is needed. The first thing you want to figure out is the VPS or Views Per Snap. Right now this is the one metric that matters when it comes to Snapchat. The best way of doing this is to figure out your average views for your videos every day and then record that number on a spreadsheet. You can then track the progress that your snaps are getting and start setting goals for the results you want to see. Also track the followers and screenshots of your snaps. Once you begin calculating the your follower metrics you'll need to figure out your follower rate, daily, weekly, monthly and eventually annually. This can be a tedious job and I'm sure there will be an app for it later or Snapchat might add it in eventually, but until then we're stuck with the "old fashion way". Keep an eye on how many screenshots are being taken, this is HUGE because you will know that what your followers saw there they really liked! Figure a way to do that same thing in your Snapchat routine.
Quality Over Quantity Just like with your other social media profiles and blogs, and marketing in general, you want to always be producing quality of quantity. What that means is that you want to be sharing the most value you can in order to help and take care of your customer. You want to have the customer in mind the entire time. If you came to a blog or a page on social media and all the person was posting were short articles with content you already knew about and this person was posting 3 times a day. You'd probably spend a few quick seconds, glance over a few posts to see if you could get any nuggets and then leave. Lets say you found a blog where the author posted only 3 times a week but when you read their posts it's like you hit the gold mine. They have lengthy articles and their content is so jam packed with value that all you want to do is absorb everything that they had to offer. You want to have the best content out there, the best that anyone can find. Why? To serve and to help others, to help them get results in whatever they're doing.
Playing Detective A good Snapchat Marketer will go into other people’s stories and watch, see if there is anything that you could help them with, anything that your product or service could help them with. If they are having problems washing their golden retriever and you're in pet care shoot them a chat from their snap and let them know you like their story or their snap and then tell them you noticed they were having trouble washing their dog. Tell them you just finished a blog post on "10 Simple Tricks to Use to Wash Your Golden Retriever" and send them your link. If your blog post helps that person they will be back to your blog and they will be grateful that you took the time to help them out.
Lessons Learned From Kaelin Tuell 1. Share Great Value Kaelin is into fitness and has a fitness business that she and her husband run. She gets 20,000 views daily! They were both on a webinar and she really shared great information on Snapchat. She says that you cannot over share on Snapchat as long as you are giving them good content. Snapchat is like your personal TV show and people want to watch it. So make sure you are adding pure value to your market. 2. Giveaways She says that giving away something for free is huge. She tells her viewers to screenshot the next snap and reminds them they only have 10 seconds to do this.
3. Conssistancy The more that you make snaps the more you will be at the top of your friends stories list. Don't over do it but post as much as you can. Sharing value here and there so that people don't get bored with your story. I'd even suggest trying different times that you post and see what times you get the most views and screenshots taken. Once you have an idea of when you get the most engagement start posting at those times to get the most exposure. 4. Link Sharing To get people to their content and their webinars, Kaelin has them on Monday and Thursday, on Sunday she's sharing MASSIVE value, then on Monday she shares more value and lets people know that they need to screen shot the next link because they're doing a webinar that night. On Tuesday she's sharing value, Wednesday she's sharing value and telling people about their webinar the next day. On Thursday she straight promotes their webinar. When you're getting 20,000 daily views I'm sure she gets a bunch of people into their webinar. 5. Q & A Kaelin tells people to message her questions through Snapchat messaging and then she responds back to them. This creates IMMENSE value to the customer. If they message her that they’re succeeding at something she shoots a video back giving thumbs up and congratulations. If they have a question she's thanking them for their question and responds to them. 6. Snapchat "Cribs" Alright, I didn't know what to name that last one but Kaelin used the example of MTV Cribs. She thinks about what she would like to see from her mentors and she said she'd love to see some of their houses, so she goes and shows her followers her house. Think about if you were your audience what would you want to see from yourself? :) She is herself, quirky, funny, she's open and vulnerable to her audience.
Snapchat 3rd Party Apps
Ghost for Snapchat: This is a handy app. I don't use it much but there are still some cool features that I like to use. I know this is on iphone but I'm not sure if it's on android. If you want to check out their twitter go here. Ghost for Snapchat offers a lot of cool features. It's more of a photo editing tool but you can add text with different fonts which I really like! Go to whatever app store you use and check it out, look through the reviews for it as it does have mixed reviews. Here is what you can do with it.
It pretty much looks like Snapchat except for the tools at the very bottom. You will need to sign in as you would with Snapchat so that it can send straight to your stories from this app.
Here are all the filters that you can apply to your photos if you choose. These filters are like the sepia and such, the one that I used was Vignette.
Next are the adjustments, you can change the brightness and contrast using three sliders.
With Ghost Effects there are a few more filters you can add, this one changed the hue of my photo.
The next tool is the blur tool which is pretty basic, you can focus on an area and blur the rest of the image if you choose to. You can use Rotate to rotate your image. There is a draw tool in this app as well. I din't go into it since you can do it in Snapchat as well. With Ghost for Snapchat you can change the thickness of the brush you use which will come in handy if you want to fill in a large area with your drawing tool. Splash I haven't fiured out yet. As far as I can tell it doesn't do anything to my image. You can crop and resize your images if you need to.
The tone curve is cool, if you want to spend some time on your photos before you send them to Snapchat you can really make some good looking images!
The next two tools are Sticker and Emoticons but they don't offer anything that is better than what Snapchat has. Snapchat has more and they look much better. Ghost for Snapchat only has ten or fifteen in each category.
Once you're in the text tool you'll want to hit the plus sign to add a text box.
This is what the text box looks like.
You can tap the color swatch in the middle to change the color text, you'll have a bit more choice with this app with the color slider.
Last in the text is choosing the font, this is pretty much why I got this app. It has a decent list with decent font choices!
Once you're done adding whatever you want to your latest snap you'll get this screen just like in Snapchat. It's a little different but the icons are the same. Once you have everything finished, all your time selected and if you choose to doodle on your image tap the arrows and it will take you to the screen with your friends and your story. Choose who you want to send to and you're done! Pretty cool right? You can now customize your snaps as you like. This logs straight into you Snapchat so you could technically stay in Ghost for Snapchat all the time if you wanted. I prefer the Snapchat interface personally. You can also add photos or videos right from your camera roll on your phone as well! You can clip down the time of your videos and if you are reading something on your phone or you see an image you like you can screen shot it and upload it to snaochat through Ghost for Snapchat.
Ghost Codes This app is absolutely awesome! I recommend it! This app I know for sure is on iphone and android. Unlike Snapchat, Ghost Codes allows you to connect with others in your field or your niche. Bringing a search to Snapchat.
I don't recall how I set this app up. I'll do a walk through of it soon but the setup is not hard at all. This is your profile screen. You can set up a short bio for yourself, add social media so that others can connect with you on your other social platforms and you also get to select some interests so that when people search in thos interests you'll pop up. You can also see the hear symbol and the down arrow symbol, the heart is kudos. Kudos are the sort of "ranking" system that Ghost Codes use. The more kudos you have the higher you will appear in your categories screen. If you are in the inspiration and motivation field then you would put that as one of your interests, when people search of motivation you'll appear in the list of all the other people in that category. The higher to the top you are the more likely you will be seen. The Down Arrow downloads someones snapcode to your camera roll. All you have to do is go to the add section in Snapchat and "add by snapcode", the app will scan the code and add them as a friend! quick and easy, just stay on top of it!
On the home screen (the button in the lower left side) these are some of the top ranking people in each category. You have to get a lot of kudos to make it here. Start working! These will be influencers, if they're succeeding on Ghost Codes then you'll want to see what they're doing and model after them. Add them and watch their stories.
In the Categories section you can choose a category that you connect with or that is in your niche and see all who are in that category. You can go through, check them out and download their snap code and give them kudos.
In the Search tab this is what you'll see. You can search Snappers, if you know the name of the person you want to add you can use this. Or you can search by Interests, and what you can do with this is search by keyword, lets say bloggers. You;ll see a list with that keyword in it and to the right of the keyword you'll see a number of how many people are in that keyword. Once you click the one you like you'll see the list again of the people who are in the blogging arena. tap through and add their snapcode or give them kudos.
Your activity is where you are going to see snappers who have either given you kudos or downloaded your snapcode. It's easy to be able to add them back and share the love. Then you can chat them in Snapchat and thank them for giving you kudos and downloading your snapcode. Saweet!!!
In Conclusion If you are not on Snapchat yet and you are marketing a business I strongly suggest getting in on it now! Social media platforms come and go, think MySpace, Facebook has stuck around but now that Live is out on it I don't hear much about Periscope any more which was what everyone was talking about a year ago. I don't know if Snapchat will ever go, I know that I will stay with it. It's a very promising tool right now and I hope that it stays for a long time just because it is so raw. Marketers, business people and the different niches are all getting on Snapchat. If that many people are able to use it and get awarness to what they're doing then don't you think you should be on it too? It is a very powerful tool, I hope you jump on the bandwagon! ChadFopma.com