Snapchat for Business- Getting Started

by Startacus Admin

Tips for Getting Started with Snapchat for Business

We’ve discussed how businesses like Audi and the World Wildlife Fund have used Snapchat to great advantage, and given you ideas for how you can do the same. But before you launch into campaigns and start sending pictures and videos all over the place, there are some basics you might want to consider.

First, here are a handful of random facts that might help you to see why Snapchat could be good for your business:

• Snapchat has 100 million users active daily

• More than 60% of 13-34 year old smartphone users in the US use Snapchat

• Daily views of Snapchat videos total 8 billion

• Percentage of marketers using Snapchat was just 1% in 2014

• The percentage of polled college students who would purchase a product from a brand that sent them a coupon is 58%

The last two figures were admittedly from 2014, as there don’t seem to be up-to-date reports on these, but they’re still good numbers to bear in mind. The popularity of Snapchat has grown rapidly since it launched in 2011, and it’s certainly not too late to start engaging with such an eager and willing audience.

Understand Snapchat

It would probably be a good idea before you get going to actually understand how Snapchat works. Snapchat allows you to send videos and pictures to your followers, with captions or doodles if you want, both of which automatically delete themselves 10 seconds after being viewed. Direct messaging like this isn’t the only way to use it, though, and may not be the best way for business.

Your ‘story’ is a collection of your pictures and videos that you can broadcast for all Snapchat users to see, or for just your followers. This collection lasts 24 hours before disappearing. While you are building a following on Snapchat, this will almost certainly be what you will use the most.

And that’s pretty much it. Snapchat’s simplicity is one of the things that makes it appealing, though it might at first give it the deceptive sense of complexity.

Family friendly

The average age group of Snapchat users is 13-34 years, so if your idea of being casual and ‘keeping it real’ is to talk to your audience the way you might if you were all in a bar on a Friday night, you might want to reconsider.

Get rid of the cold, sterilised feel of a presentation and do away with the false warmth and caring of corporate advertising. But don’t give up professionalism. This isn’t about taking your audience with you on a drunken weekend or to grandma’s house for Sunday dinner just to show that you’re a real, normal person. This is simply humanising your business and giving your audience new and interesting ways of interacting with it. It takes maturity to deliver engaging content for a general audience, and maturity is a desirable and trustworthy trait in a business, so being family friendly is in everyone’s best interests.

I dub thee…

It almost goes without saying, especially when you are creating an account for business, that you should be careful when choosing your username. Not only for the obvious sake of professionalism, but because Snapchat does not have a profile feature like Twitter or Facebook. The only things that a Snapchat profile shows are the display name, the username, your picture, and score. Users also can’t view profiles of anyone who is not on their friends list.

What this means is that calling yourself GibbonWrangler34 isn’t going to tell anyone that you’re a fashion designer trying to give them special offers on your clothing. Trying to get around this by, say, making your profile picture a photo of your business card kind of defeats the idea of this being a more casual and laidback form of marketing.

And with that, you’re ready to get started. There’s nothing else you really need to know. As previously mentioned, Snapchat is pretty simple, so from here it’s up to you how you use it. Once you’ve got a bit of a following, you may want to start using it for special offers only available to Snapchat followers, create little games or riddles that result in something only your followers can avail of, and basically think of interesting and engaging ways to use Snapchat’s uniqueness to your advantage. The most important thing is to work out how Snapchat works best and to what its users respond favourably, rather than trying to force it to work for your existing marketing strategy and social media sharing methods.

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Published on: 26th April 2016