The last couple of years Snapchat has gained huge popularity especially with the young audience. The social media app is so popular now that even presidency candidate Donald Trump launched a filter to support his campaign. What is the power of Snapchat?
The power of Snapchat lies partly in the fact that it lowers the threshold for smartphone users to create their own content because the content disappears within 24 hours. This enables people who do want to share their life with their friends and family to do this in a fun way without being on the internet for forever. It also gives them control over who consumes their content as they can see who actually watches their Snapchat Story.
A second thing that makes Snapchat successful are of course the famous Snapchat filters. Which makes it more fun for consumers to create their content. It’s also way to monetize the app, which we see again in the U.. presidency campaign, but also movie premieres etc. ‘ ‘advertise’ through Snapchat filters. This is a whole new interesting way to advertise because when a consumer uses the filter it works in two major ways. First, in allows the advertising company to really connect with the consumers because of the highly interactive nature of the filters. Secondly, if the Snapchat user posts content with the advertised filter on their Snapchat story, all or their friends see the filter and know for example that the new Batman movie is in theatres right now. Given the social aspect of the app and it’s IM nature it is not difficult to see how this can directly lead to two extra customers.
All in all Snapchat is really innovative social media platform. This is not only fun, but I think it can potentially be a great new way of advertising, that works better than alternatives because of the social aspect and because of the interaction level.
sources:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/26/technology/trump-snapchat-debate-filter/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-vaynerchuk/the-snap-generation-a-gui_b_9103216.html
Julian,
Wouldn’t you say that advertising through filter has a rather small reach/audience? In my opinion the advertising power of Snapchat lies in the small snippets of branded content you get in your home screen of even while watching stories of other snapchat users. Interested in hearing your thoughts.
Best, Olivier
Hey Julian,
Snapchat has even more features why advertising on their platform is so good. A few of these include specific information about the customers like Snap Audience Match (Targets people based on their email addresses and unique advertising identifiers attached to their phones), lookalikes (Targets people who share characteristics with a certain audience) and Snapchat Lifestyle Categories (Targets people based on interest categories like gaming, music, technology, and sports). It is no wonder that Snapchat is expected to earn 1 billion dollar revenue of ads in 2017 (https://www.sprinklr.com/the-way/snapchat-ads/).
Thank you for sharing you article Julian. Snapchat has for sure deliver advertising that will work better because of the interaction that Snapchat provides. But I also think this can lead to some implications:
Data: when Snapchat ad formats roll out, they will offer little-to-zero data-driven targeting capabilities due to the posting and quick deleting of users short form video snippets.
Eyeballs don’t stay long enough: snapchat users’ attention span is very short, and it’s highly unlikely that they will be receptive to advertising seeing that user content posts range from one to 10 seconds.
What do you think? Again, thanks for the information!
Kind regards,
Amir
Thank you Julian, you gave a nice overview of the strengths of Snapchat advertising. I also wrote an article about advertising on Snapchat, so I want to add a few things (https://digitalstrategy.rsm.nl//2016/10/21/gospooky-how-teenagers-disrupt-snapchat-marketing/). Snapchat is particularly interesting for companies who want to advertise to a young target group (<25). This group is barely using traditional media (e.g. TV, radio), so companies have to find another way to reach them. A problem for big companies is that they don't have the knowledge to run a campaign on Snapchat. Two young entrepreneurs started a company called GoSpooky and they are helping Dutch companies with developing these campaigns. It is indeed a really innovative social media platform and it offers a lot of opportunities for advertisers.