SnapChat for brands? That’s right. This fast paced (and we mean fast…each video/photo lasts for a maximum of 24 hours) is on the rise as a social marketing tool.
1. You can only follow 6000 people. This means it’s okay to be selective on what influencers you follow as your brand.
2. Anyone can buy a geo filter. This is a great opportunity for brick and mortar stores, brands attending events, or even to target specific geographical location. Have your designer create a geofilter then submit it for approval (account for a week of approval time). Once it’s approved you can target any location starting at $5 per hour for 20,000 square feet.
3. It IS possible to do more than one line of text. How?, you ask.
- Open notes on your iPhone and tap “return” until you have as many rows as you want.
- “Select All” and copy the selected blank rows
- Paste these blank rows directly into the text area of the SnapChat image you want to send
Pro Tip: You’ll need to “click” on each row to add text, text will not wrap
4. You can make phone calls and send messages. Talk about direct interaction. Unlike Twitter, you don’t need a “mutual following” to directly connect with your audience. This is also a great feature for quick support on SnapChat community management or top influencer outreach.
5. Your number of followers is not publicly visible. Unlike most social networks that base popularity off of number of followers, SnapChat keeps the number of followers private. This means you can focus your engagement on quality visits not quantity.
6. You can advertise your brand’s SnapChat cross-channel. If your brand is new to SnapChat you can use advertising on Facebook or the web to drive traffic to your SnapChat. Create a custom Snap Code with your brand logo and SnapChat name to push to your target audience.
7. You can find followers by phone number. You might already know this, but have you thought about collecting phone numbers on your website and importing those to find people to follow on SnapChat? If your CRM collects phone numbers, add them to your contacts and import them directly to SnapChat. This will give you a great starting point of who to follow as your brand.
8. You can download a high res version of your snapcode. If you visit https://accounts.snapchat.com/accounts/snapcodes you can download your unique Snap Code which you can use in your advertisements and promotional posts cross-channel to drive traffic to your brand’s SnapChat.
Pro Tip: Edit the “white ghost” to be your logo
9. There’s an entire color wheel to chose from. If you don’t see your brand’s color pre-listed when you draw on a picture, fear not. You can obtain any color under the sun by dragging your finger off the color chart and across the screen.
10. See exactly who watched your story. The bad news is there are few tools out there right now to thoroughly track your analytics from SnapChat, the good news is, you can get some information directly within your SnapChat account. You can see not only how many people viewed your post, but who specifically did.
Bonus: Now that you know all the secrets of SnapChat here’s a few tips to use it to market your brand:
- Send traffic to a unique landing page (i.e. www.nike.com/snapchat) to track incoming traffic
- Run a flash sale only on SnapChat to increase followers. Promote the sale across all of your other channels, but let your audience know they can only get the coupon code if they add you on SnapChat. Remember, snaps only survive for 24 hours so this is a true flash sale!
- Give a face to your SnapChat! There are many popular SnapChatters and Bloggers alike, have your PR team search for the right people to take over your brand’s SnapChat for a day.
