Snapchat has been the slow burner of social media. It hasn’t had the sudden rise to prominence of Facebook or Twitter, nor does it have the hipster cachet of Instagram. Instead, it has focused primarily on the youth market. Its business plan understands that once the young people are on board, the older ones will follow.
05 April 2016 - Social media maven Gary Vaynerchuk predicts that by 2018 Snapchat’s 100 million users will have exploded. He thinks the uptake over the next two years will be so great that it will begin to rival Facebook’s 1.5 billion and it will be a true powerhouse in the social media landscape. Vaynerchuk sees Snapchat’s points of difference as key components of why it will be a success. “It goes left to right instead of up and down. The filters look weird” says Vaynerchuk, and asserts that a reluctance to jump on board this latest social media bandwagon will see marketers left behind “Ninety-five per cent of marketers have never tried Snapchat, just like they've been reluctant to try every new app, and they'll spend a fortune scrambling to catch up once it goes mainstream.”
Snapchat is a platform for sharing images and video between friends or as a public feed. The private photos “self-destruct” after a set time frame, making it a channel that creates a sense of immediacy and uniqueness around every piece of shared content. There are a number of innovative ways that advertises have started to take advantage of this, from ‘sneak peeks’ behind the scenes of their brands, to discount vouchers that require the user to make the choice to use their free “snap replay” on the brand’s offer.
Social media isn’t like traditional forms of advertising and is designed to create a community around brands and people. The market has evolved to a point where new channels are identified and fill the gaps, rather than many competing networks each vying for a piece of the pie. Facebook isn’t a direct competitor to Snapchat, nor is Twitter one to Instagram, and certainly not in the same way as competing TV stations or newspapers. As the concept of social media marketing(https://www.impressive.com.au/capabilities/social-media-marketing/) has grown, the ideas around what it can be and can’t be have shifted and developed to a point where virtually anything is possible.
Contact Name:
Robert Tadros
Impressive Digital Agency Pty Ltd
1300 191 943
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https://www.impressive.com.au/