Marketers spend millions of dollars on Facebook, the country’s largest social network. But a little-known messaging service, Snapchat, has been quietly adding new features, passionate users, and forward-thinking brands, and is now poised as a more cost-effective platform than its giant rival. Here’s how Snapchat might actually be better than Facebook at engaging customers, fans, and even job-seekers.
What is Snapchat?
Snapchat is a messaging app for smartphones with a simple twist: All messages, photos, and videos disappear in 1-10 seconds, based on the sender’s choice. The content is deleted not only from recipients’ phones but also from Snapchat’s servers. Thus, Snapchat’s content is ephemeral. It’s a sort of anti-Facebook; fans can reply to messages, but they can’t comment or “like” them, or share the content with friends.
1. Snapchat is less noisy and more personal than Facebook
Snapchat currently has just 26 million US users, compared to Facebook’s more than 125 million. But here, less is actually more. Facebook has now made it all but impossible for brands to reach fans without paying, and even promoted content often gets lost in users’ newsfeeds, so Snapchat’s relative quiet and intimacy becomes an advantage. The Los Angeles Times declares that “chat apps” like Snapchat are able to “place marketing messages front and center to people enthusiastic enough to follow stars and brands on them.” Because Snapchat was made for private communication between friends, most messages from brands — and especially from celebrities — seem more like personal text messages and less like blaring billboards.
Here’s an example: NARS cosmetics offered an exclusive look at a new product line only to its Snapchat friends. NARS could have posted the preview on Facebook, where it would have easily been shared by fans and the press, but the company opted for the feel of a VIP event by hosting it in the more quiet, intimate Snapchat. As Convince and Convert put it, “the exclusivity and opportunity to send personalized content for a limited time only made Snapchat the perfect forum for this announcement.”
2. Snapchat lets brands chat with customers
Snapchat recently launched a video-calling feature: If two friends are logged in at the same time, they can video chat — just like Skype or FaceTime, and pointedly unlike Facebook Messenger. This offers a great opportunity for brands to show exclusive content, host a video presentation with an executive, and even handle customer service issues. Recruiters can use this feature to interview job-seekers as well.
Snapchat also enhanced its basic instant-messaging platform. Instead of a 45-character limit — the app was created for sharing photos, not text — users can now conduct a complete text conversation with no character or word limit. So brands can also host live chats with text, similar to Twitter, as pop singer Ariana Grande did recently, to great success. Facebook can also be a platform for live chats, but the post/comment/reply structure makes it difficult to follow, and prone to both off-topic tangents and spam by mischievous users. Snapchat’s simplicity gets the edge here, while its video feature handily beats Facebook.
3. Snapchat Stories allows brands to create Facebook-like feed
So far, we’ve seen how Snapchat is different from Facebook, but the app recently launched a new feature that may beat Facebook at its own game. The function is called Stories. According to Snapchat’s blog: “Snapchat Stories add Snaps together to create a narrative. When you add a Snap to your Story it lives for 24 hours before it disappears, making room for the new.” So it’s sort of like a Facebook newsfeed, with a constantly changing collection of posts from within the last 24 hours.
Brands have already taken advantage of this feature. The NBA created a story in photos that led up to Kevin Durant’s acceptance speech for the year’s Most Valuable Player award. Even more interesting, GrubHub used a Snapchat Story to hire a social media intern, using Snapchat’s illustration feature to create six drawings explaining how to apply.
The emphasis on imagery over text, along with the timeline-like feature, makes Snapchat Stories a hybrid not only of Facebook but also of Instagram, a winning combination for any marketer.
Are chat apps the future of mobile marketing?
They’ll definitely play a part. Snapchat is closing in on Facebook Messenger’s 43 million users, with similar apps like Kik, WhatsApp, Viber, and Line also gaining ground. And we’ve all seen the surveys that show younger people, such as Generation Z, leaving Facebook for more private social networks like Snapchat. So Snapchat should be part of any organization’s plans for marketing, branding, or recruiting in 2015.
Want to get started with Snapchat? Brandemix can help.
Jason Ginsburg is Director of Interactive Branding at Brandemix.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jody Ordioni is the author of “The Talent Brand.” In her role as Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix, she leads the firm in creating brand-aligned talent communications that connect employees to cultures, companies, and business goals. She engages with HR professionals and corporate teams on how to build and promote talent brands, and implement best-practice talent acquisition and engagement strategies across all media and platforms. She has been named a "recruitment thought leader to follow" and her mission is to integrate marketing, human resources, internal communications, and social media to foster a seamless brand experience through the employee lifecycle.
