Our guest contributor this week is Denis Brzozowski, an entrepreneur, designer, and founder of Wolfden Creative. In this post, Denis explains two new Snapchat features and how they can benefit businesses of all sizes.
DENIS BRZOZOWSKI
In the past 6 weeks, Snapchat has introduced two new somewhat game-changing features to their app. In this article, we will begin to briefly analyse them and see how they can benefit or affect the communications and marketing of brands and businesses around the world.
Overview
Let’s start with the ever-controversial Snapchat Map feature. This has stirred up quite a bit of a mix of opinions in the world of privacy and personal data. We’ve understandably seen this debate around the safety of kids and teens however when it comes to brands, this feature can be looked at from a marketing perspective that could be beneficial.
Maps allow all of your Snapchat friends to see your exact location on a map. This can, of course, be turned off (ghost mode) but it is an opt-out feature by default, meaning once the app updates it’s already running. We saw businesses do great things with Pokemon Go in the summer of 2016. This is a similar scenario. An interactive feature (the game / the map) which will attract the consumers (people playing / Snapchat users) to interesting places (where there are Pokemon / where their friends are hanging out)
How businesses can benefit This is a perfect set-up for locally based businesses, that target a young demographic. Take a bar or a mall as an example. The perfect target market now has a way of not only sharing images and videos from where they have been, but they can now show where they are in real time. Businesses could benefit by encouraging young consumers to post content to Snapchat showing where they are, for their peers to see and take notice of. This then creates awareness, usually, something would be offered in return for this i.e. ‘free Wi-fi / soft drink if you share content and Snapchat location with your friends. We’ve again seen a very similar thing happen when local bars started to offer free Wi-fi and discounts to members of certain Pokemon Go teams, as well as paying youngsters to sit in their place of business and play the game, attracting more and more players into the building.
I can also imagine the use of Snap Maps for several marketing campaigns across the globe, including egg hunts, chases, treasure hunts and more. Anything that can be played on a map essentially. Imagine this, what game would you play if you had a set of highly accurate GPS trackers and a bunch of mates to play with.
Overview This in my opinion is the superior of the two. Even though the update probably means much less to the standard 13 – 28-year-old user of the app, from a marketing and brand perspective, it’s a game-changer. You can finally link your viewers out of Snapchat and into any URL you wish.
Huge marketing benefits As far as marketing and sales funnels go, this is the best thing since sliced bread. Marketers were forever wishing and waiting for Snapchat to allow users to send their viewers to a page on the internet where they can actually perform an action of some sort (e.g. sign up, like, follow, purchase, add to cart etc.), and now it’s here! We all wish Instagram Stories would do the same, although if the history of feature release trends between Snapchat and Instagram is anything to go by, it should be implemented into Instagram within the next 6 months.
Why it’s such a big deal Because it’s what we’ve all been waiting for, and it really does make a difference. As far as the cognitive load and user behaviour are concerned, a much lower percentage of users will bother to “go to the link in bio” or manually copy a URL into their browsers. Allowing the story viewer to click right there right then and be taken to an in-app browser window, cuts down the time of the whole process by more than half. Convenience = winning.
It’s also a big deal for Snap Inc themselves, as at least, in my opinion, they finally have a feature that I can say hands down gives them an advantage over Instagram Stories.
Any downfalls? As with any feature, there will be some drawbacks in some way or another. Allowing users to link out of the app itself, will mean that fewer users will actually come back into the app and continue using it. What does this mean? Here’s a quick explanation:
For OP (Original Poster): After posting a story with a link-out, it is to be expected that there will be a fall in the view count on the following story. After users link out to a website, they are more likely to browse the website, and there is a chance they will become distracted and drift anywhere on the internet.
For the viewer: It’s one more distraction to be aware of. By linking out to an external URL you show your interest in the website/product you are going to see, and therefore are more likely to forget about the story you were just watching, and continue on your travels across the World Wide Web.
For Snap Inc: As mentioned above, view counts can be expected to decline, thus resulting in fewer minutes spent on the app, which is one of Snap Inc’s main KPIs. Saying that this feature update is due to attract more users to the app, and increasing the number of DAUs (Daily Active Users) and therefore minutes spent in the app.
Big thanks to Matrix Internet again for having me, it’s a pleasure to collaborate with their team once in a while! Head over to Wolfden Creative’s blog to read a post from Matrix Internet’s Gretta Dattan on Google Shopping.
I appreciate you all taking the time to read this, if you have any questions or just want to get in touch, feel free to drop me a line at denis@wolfdencreative.com
You can also connect with me on social media, here are the links! Instagram: @_denisbrz Twitter: @_denisbrz Facebook: fb.me/denisbrzbiz LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denis-brzozowski-69b0a7ab/’
Website: https://www.wolfdencreative.com/
By Jeff Sheridan
By Matrix Internet