Snapchat is King
Although Snapchat has been around for a while (it launched in 2011) there is no question that it’s quickly becoming the most popular social network, and where consumers go, businesses no doubt follow.
At the moment Snapchat advertising is almost exclusively available to multimillion dollar, multinational corporations, but rumour has it prices are being slashed and as soon as advertising becomes accessible to the average Joe Business, Snapchat for Business will really take off. At the moment, for most businesses the prospect of putting large amounts of budget behind Snapchat campaign would still be a pretty daunting venture.
An alternative option is to get involved with Snapchat’s Geofilters. Easy to do, Snapchat will hold your hand through the entire process. Essentially you need to create a web-optimised transparent .PNG file, 1080 pixels wide x 1920 pixels high and be less than 300KB. You then set the area and time frame that you want your Geofilter to be available, hand over your card details (at the time of writing prices are pretty reasonable) and hey pronto you’ve created a Geofilter!
And if you’re in any doubt over the power of Snapchat you just have to look at the attempts of other social networks to become more like it. By now you’ll have probably heard about Instagram’s version of Snapchat Stories, originally named Instagram Stories. It’s where users are encouraged to ‘share the moments in-between’ their usual, carefully curated Instagram posts, in a fun and spontaneous ‘Snapchatty’ way.
Facebook (Instagram’s parent company) is also getting in on the action as they test a camera that automatically opens atop your timeline to make it easier to post personal and original photos and videos to the network. With it being widely reported that original sharing on Facebook is declining, the hope is that making the camera function easier to access (like it is on Snapchat) will reverse this trend. It’s the same reason why Facebook have been fiddling with their timeline algorithm to prioritise posts from family and friends over publishers and business pages.
At the moment, Snapchat is King of the social media castle, so if you don’t already know how it works, there’s no better time to familiarise yourself with it!