Snapchat
Company Facts
Founded: September 16th, 2011
Headquarters: Santa Monica, CA
Founders: Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, Reggie Brown
Platform Types: Mobile App, Instant Messaging, Photo Sharing
Parent Company: Snap Inc.
Marketing Information
Snapchat is a mobile app that allows users to send photo, video, and text messages to their friends. Users can add designs called filters and lenses on top of their messages to make them more fun and visually interesting. Another feature that makes Snapchat messages unique is that they disappear just a few seconds after they’re opened. This gives Snapchat a more private feel than other messaging apps.
Snapchat also allows users to post public photo and video messages called stories. These messages last for 24 hours and play in chronological order, so many people use them as a way to document their day and share updates with their friends and family.
Snapchat has a page called Discover where users can view stories and other content made by their friends, influencers, and publishers like Vox. If you want to advertise there, you can run a story ad. Story ads are a collection of 3 to 20 short ads that open whenever someone taps on them. These ads blend in well with the rest of the content on the Discover page, so they tend to have a high open rate.
Here are some other ways to market your business on Snapchat:
Make a creative filter or lens that people will want to share. Incorporate your company’s name and logo into the design to increase brand exposure.
Buy a snap ad. Snap ads are ten-second, full screen ads that appear throughout the app. Your ad can be a video or a still image and include a call-to-action at the end that encourages users to visit your website.
Run a commercial on one of Snapchat’s new original shows. These six-second commercials aren’t skippable like story ads or snap ads, so they’ll be viewed by more people.
Create a Snapchat account for your business and start recording stories. Use your stories to announce new products, offer promo codes, and take your customers behind-the-scenes of your business.
Notable Employees
Evan Spiegel
Bobby Murphy
Reggie Brown
History
In April of 2011, Evan Spiegel proposed Snapchat in a product design class at Stanford University. Three months later, Siegel and fellow founders Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown launched the app, originally called Picaboo. Shortly after the launch, Brown was forced out of the startup by Spiegel and Murphy. In September, the two remaining founders rebranded Picaboo as Snapchat and added a feature that made it possible for users to caption their photos.
Snapchat gained popularity rapidly, especially among teens, and grew to more than 10 million active users in its first year. Early success didn’t make Spiegel and Murphy complacent—they kept generating innovative ideas and improving their app.
In 2013, they added stories to Snapchat, a popular feature that has even been adopted by other social media platforms like Instagram. In 2014, they added geofilters and ads, both of which have been important sources of revenue for the company. And in 2015, they added the Discover page, which led to lucrative partnerships with publishers like Food Network and Vox.
Not all of Snapchat’s innovations have been successful, however. SnapKidz, a drawing app for kids, was launched in 2013. It failed to catch on and was eventually removed from the App Store. In 2014, Snapchat released another feature called Snapcash, which allowed users to send money to each other. It was retired in 2018.
More recently, Snapchat has taken losses on their augmented reality glasses and released an unsuccessful redesign that caused their user base to shrink. Snapchat has also struggled with profitability, despite its 30 billion dollar valuation when it went public in 2017.
Although the future of Snapchat looks unclear because of its issues with profitability, it’s still a great tool for marketers. The app has over 190 million users, most of which are young adults under the age of 29. If you’re trying to market your products and services to a younger demographic, Snapchat is the best place to do it.
Marketing Tools
Snapchat Ads
Filter and Lens Creator
Educational Resources
Latest Posts About Snapchat
Whoops! It does’t appear we have any recent content related to Snapchat on this website.
Latest News From Snapchat For Business
Snapchat has a blog, located at ForBusiness.Snapchat.com/blog, where they post updates and tips for businesses and marketers using Snapchat’s platform and tools to reach customers. Unfortunately that blog doesn’t have an RSS feed and there is no way to generate an automated RSS feed due to how the content is structured. However, oddly Snapchat For Business does maintain a Twitter account where this same content is posted. We used that Twitter feed to generate the content for the latest news feed below.
References
http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/02/03/snapchat-drama-reggie-brown/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-snapchat
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/how-to-use-snapchat/
https://businesshelp.snapchat.com/en-US/article/snap-ads-intro
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-snap-snapchat-evan-spiegel-cash-ipo-20190419-story.html