by Kayla Lee edited by Nicholas D’Angelo
With 187 million active daily users and an average use time of 30 minutes per user, you can bet that Snapchat is a good platform for your business to be active.
Millennials, in particular, the younger ones, love Snapchat. A recent survey found that 78% of high school students use the app daily.
What’s more, Facebook is likely to lose around 2 million active usersunder age 25 in 2018, while Snapchat will pick up around 2 million users under age 25.
This section assumes that you’re a newbie to Snapchat (skip down to the business section if you’re familiar with the app). Here, we’re going to show you how to get started.
First things first, you’ll need an account. To get started with Snapchat, download the app.
Then, create an account.
This short video explains how to get started using Snapchat.
Snapchat’s home screen is really just a camera screen with a few other options. Check out the image and descriptions below to learn more.
Now that you have an understanding of how the app works, it’s also important to learn some Snapchat lingo. Here are some phrases you should get familiar with when you use Snapchat:
A snap is an image or video you create within the app and send to a friend. The term snap also refers to the images/videos that you receive in the app.
Snap is also commonly used to mean a chat message sent within the app.
One of the biggest differentiators between Snapchat and other social media applications is that snaps disappear a few seconds after being viewed.
To send a snap, open the camera/home screen. Tap the capture button to take a picture, or hold the capture button to record a video.
Next, make any edits you like, and then you’re ready to send. See the image and descriptions below to learn more about Snapchat editing.
The best way to learn how to use these features and get the most out of them is to get your hands dirty, just try them out.
A Snapchat story is a collection of photos/videos. When you decide to add a snap to your story, it’s shared with either all of your Snapchat followers or a certain few that you select.
Here’s how to make a story:
Friends are people you’ve added on Snapchat. Friends can view your stories and any snaps you send to them. You can also view their stories and see any snaps they’ve sent to you.
Here’s how to add friends on Snapchat:
Filters are decorative overlays that you can add to your pictures.
A Geofilter is a filter available in a certain location. For example, a vacation destination like Disney World, might have a special filter (see below).
Snapchat lenses are augmented reality (AR) filters that use animation, sound, or a combo of both. Lenses can be 2D or 3D (more on these later in the business section).
To use a Snapchat lens:
Press and hold on the face inside the frame that you want to add a lens to. You’ll see an icon swirling in the middle of the screen (see screenshot below) once Snapchat has detected the face or faces.
Swipe through the filter options (found beside the capture button) and take a photo or video using the capture button.
Memories allow Snapchat users to back up their snaps and stories to their camera roll. This comes in handy since snaps disappear once they’re viewed!
Snapchat has a text/chat feature. Like we mentioned, when people say, “I sent you a snap,” they could mean an image or video or they could be referring to a Snapchat chat message.
This feature allows you to share your location with your friends, and also see where your friends are. You can turn the feature off anytime (ghost mode) if you don’t want people to know your whereabouts.
The Friends page is where Snapchat collects all your friends that have recently shared stories and snaps. You can view the Friends page by swiping right from the home screen. Friends are located at the top of the page.
The discover page is a collection of your friends, publications you follow and other brands and influencers. Swipe left from the home screen to view your Discover page.
It won’t take you long to learn how to use Snapchat, especially if you’re an avid user of other social media platforms. Once you get the hang of it, it’s time to learn about how you can use Snapchat to grow your business and improve your brand awareness.
Snapchat offers a variety of business services including Ads, Geofilters, Lenses, and more. There are also a ton of demographics and audiences you can reach within the platform. Here are the primary ways to use Snapchat for business.
Snap Ads are 10-second videos that drive users to a call-to-action, like an embedded link. Check out this list of Snapchat’s allowed CTAs.
Your photos and videos need to abide by certain specs in order to be approved for use on Snapchat. Here are some of Snapchat’s ad specs:
As we’ve learned, there is a lot you can do with Snapchat. But there are also certain things you should avoid when creating a Snapchat ad. Here’s a list of Snapchat’s restrictions, taken directly from their spec document.
When you’ve got your creative ready, whether video, gif, image, etc., you’re going to want to get super specific about who you target. Just like you would with any other ad platform.
There are hundreds of audience types on Snapchat. You can focus on reaching retailers, vegans, banks, etc.
Or, you could focus on a particular demographic, like young people in Austin, TX.
Just like other social media platforms, you can save your audiences. You can also create audience matches by uploading a customer list.
Or, you can use the lookalike feature to build an audience most similar to your best customers.
Then, use that collected info to retarget those people with a Snapchat Ad while they’re in the app. Retargeting significantly reduces cost-per-acquisition.
With the use of Geo-positioning tech and beacons, Snapchat shows your ad or specific lens to an audience at a location that you’ve selected.
Back in 2017, Snapchat made it super affordable for businesses to create their own Geofilters, with pricing starting at $5.99 and templates that are easily customized.
Many companies have used Geofilters successfully. For example, Netflix launched a Geofilter ad to promote the release of the new Gilmore Girls show. They printed a bunch of coffee cups with “Lukes” logo (a shop in the show) and added Geofilters for the shops where the cups would be distributed.
Lenses are some of Snapchat’s most popular ads as they’re the ones with the AR (augmented reality) features. Lenses use facial recognition technology to put a user into the image shown, for example, allowing users to become Batman (an ad for the Batman Vs. Superman movie).
Another great example of Snapchat lenses in action is when Bacardi recently ran a lens ad that put users into a Major Lazer music video:
Users love lenses, and they’re a great way to increase brand awareness as around 70 million people use lenses every day.
Snapchat created Lens Studio, a tool where businesses can create their own Snapchat AR experiences for users. Snapchat lenses see an average increase of 9% in sales.
With Lens Studio, business owners can use templates to create their own 2D or 3D filters, or create something custom with the help of Snapchat’s AR development partners.
Discover ads are Snapchat’s most expensive advertising option. As of February 2018, Discover Ads run around $50,000 per day. This ad type places your content at the top of user Discover pages and are usually reserved for big brands.
According to Snapchat, Cosmo (apparently a leading Discover ad buyer) gets over one million views per day via this ad type.
Snapchat Publisher is where you create and edit your Snapchat ads. The process of getting started is fairly straightforward. Simply visit the site and sign up.
Once you’re logged in, you can click the top left manage ads button, and select create an ad.
Next, you can select between quick and easy or advanced ad creation.
Quick and easy is probably the best option if you’ve not got experience with Snapchat’s Ad Manager.
Once you’ve selected Quick & Easy, you can start to piece together a great ad with minimal experience.
If you don’t want to spend money on marketing your business via ads, you can always start with growing your business organically on Snapchat.
Organic growth means you build up your follower base and rely on that following to add revenue to your business.
Here are some tips to build a Snapchat tribe for your business and gain followers organically.
Keep it exciting and refreshing. Share different photos that your teammates take. Or better yet, share your customer/client photos and videos. Maybe you’ll create news videos, sharing the latest and greatest happenings in your industry.
You could even create a contest around sharing videos like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that blew up on Facebook. Taco bell is another example of a brand that nailed storytelling on Snapchat with the first ever Snapchat film.
If your content is good, if there’s a story there, something exciting and fresh, people will follow.
Are you connected with any Snapchat influencers? Or maybe another business with a big audience? There are ways you can co-market your business with the help of others who market to your same target demographic.
For example, you could partner up with another company to do an educational Snapchat story, where you both add relevant snaps to the story.
If there’s a golden rule for building a following on social media—it’s consistency. Your snaps should occur on a consistent basis, i.e. once per day. Your snaps should also be consistent with your brand and image.
If you’ve got some fans that like to send you chat messages telling you how awesome your snaps are, thank them. If people reach out to you, try your best to be available if you want to make loyal fans out of ordinary followers. Give folks a shout out in your snaps or share something they’ve snapped.
Snapchat has a pretty impressive repertoire of available advertising options – some suited for small businesses, and some best for Fortune 500s.
Whether you’re looking to grow your business via paid ads or gain some followers organically, Snapchat is definitely a platform to be active on as it’s growing rapidly.
**Make/add Friends with your whole class on Snapchat.
Plan a promotion for your brand. “What will you offer your customers”:** Half page
10 Tweets to support your Snapchat promotion: Please create 10 graphic and
Snapchat at regular intervals for your brand. This should be a relaxed day to day promotion of your brand. Through class and during the week. Feel free to be fun!
Snapchat Movie: at Least 15 clips – the class will see them all. (
Snapchat Story: collect and download the files. Details to come. (