Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Sara Morić, Junior Community Manager, DIALOG komunikacije
Across the Internet you can recently hear ever more mentions of Snapchat. And the wider audience, even professional audience, often doesn’t know what it exactly is, or thinks that it’s used only by teenagers. But many talked the same way about other social networks before Snapchat.
The following is a brief explanation of what Snapchat is and why it reached stellar popularity despite the fact that a large number of social networks already existed in 2013, when this app appeared. Snapchat is an app through which you send snaps from your life. This can be in the form of messages, videos or pictures. Now you might be wandering what’s the difference from applications such as WhatsApp. The thing is that Snapchat is a live app, meaning that anything you send you send from the spot. There’s no sending of selfies made after fifty attempts, or filtered photos from the trip. What is happening is what is being sent. I have to mention one interesting little thing, because of which Snapchat is often associated with sending explicit images. The app is set up so that each snap self-destroys after being viewed. This is a component of Snapchat, similar to private messengers, which is not important for brands.
Snapchat and brands
Given that you can set up open profiles that anyone can follow, a number of brands has used it and made their own Snapchat accounts. One other component of the app however is far more important for brands – Story. Story is an option that allows you not to send a snap only to certain people, but to put it into your daily story, so that it’s available to all your followers for 24 hours. This means that brands can communicate through Story with their followers with live photos or short videos which give a much more personal feel than Facebook and Instagram communication, and through which they can tell a story, present employees, announce news, and even do a campaign. Recent change to Snapchat is that now Stories connect one after the other. SO, if a person usually looks a Story of their friends, Snapchat will automatically switch them from one Story to another. Of course, they can be skipped, but still the first few seconds are shown. That’s why it’s important that what is shown in the first few seconds is compelling, interesting and made to attract a person to see the whole Story.
Teen Vogue and Amandla Stenberg
At the beginning of the year, the star of Hunger Games, Amandla Stenberg talked about the empowerment of black women and came out as a bisexual. It happened on Snapchat of Teen Vogue. Amandla is known for her quarrel with Kylie Jenner on Instagram regarding the appropriation of the black ways of wearing braids, and was therefore a logical choice for the promotion of the magazine directed towards teenage girls. Although rather difficult case to be recognized, Amandla teamed up with Teen Vogue and for one day took over their Snapchat account and posted for them. The method is known as the Influencer Takeover and is often used to promote a brand, or rather their social networks.
Audi and Super Bowl XLVIII
Car maker Audi took the win at Super Bowl in 2014 after teaming up with the satirical portal The Onion. This campaign was created with the aim of connecting Audi with Millennials on Snapchat. They shared stock images with humorous titles of typical situations that occur in homes of Super Bowl viewers during the game. Although the campaign was very simple, by taking over the work principle of The Onion they generated 100k+ views and over 37 million impressions on social media.
These are just a few examples of successful campaigns that brands have led to increase presence on social networks, specifically on Snapchat. Now we are left to wait to see if we will soon see similar creative campaigns in our region, especially from brands whose target audience are teens and Millennials.
