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CNN has partnered with Snapchat Discover for a daily news program called The Update. The show launches today on Snapchat, and provides a rundown of the top stories from the day featuring videos from CNN reporters and bureaus around the world. The Update is scheduled to begin streaming on Snapchat Discover each day at 6 p.m. ET and will also produce breaking news segments. Adweek’s Jason Lynch writes that each episode will feature five or more stories, all in Snap’s vertical video format—as well as breaking news segments....
It might be early days, but marketers are seeing little return when advertising on Snapchat. They also seem more interested in spending ad dollars on the company’s newfound rival: Instagram. That’s according to a series of studies published by RBC Capital Markets in partnership with Ad Age, where some 1,600 marketers were surveyed in an attempt to gauge the pulse of the digital advertising industry. The sobering news underscores the uphill battle Snapchat faces as other platforms like Facebook-owned Instagram and Messenger mimic its features. It also shows Snapchat is a far cry from being in similar company to Google or Facebook, which both received significantly higher marks from marketers. Between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and YouTube, Snapchat only outperformed AOL in terms of ROI, scoring a 3.43 out of a possible 8 points, according to the survey (AOL scored a 2.88). Google (6.98) and Facebook (6.72) led the pack, performing nearly twice as better than Snapchat, RBC said....
Snaps – 10-second videos or pictures shot on the app – are an effective and expedite way to incentivize customers and humanize a business, in addition to communicating brand initiatives and values. Small businesses all over the globe are fast capitalizing on Snapchat to elicit actions from their Snapchat followers and heighten brand awareness. If you’re a creative small business aspiring to reach a younger audience, Great! Here are 4 reasons why SMBs prefer adding Snapchat to their marketing mix over other social media channels:...
Wondering how to get more value from your Snapchat content?
Want to learn how to reuse your Snapchat stories?
You can get a bigger return on your Snapchat marketing efforts by downloading and repurposing your stories.
In this article, you’ll discover how to repurpose your Snapchat stories for other social media platforms.
While most of us (myself included) use Snapchat's drawing tool for crude drawings and scribbling extra words, there are folks out there who see this as an opportunity to create incredible works of Snapchat art. And some of them are really darn good at it. We searched far and wide for the best Snapchat drawings out there and created the list below. This collection serves as a mix of artwork from "professional Snapchatters," brands, and just normal folks who happen to be really good at drawing on their phones. Check 'em out, and get ready to be inspired to create your own Snapchat art. You may not become the next Picasso ... but you might at least make someone laugh. (And read this blog post to learn more about how to use Snapchat, including a detailed look into HubSpot's own Snapchat strategy.)...
If you’re one of the 300 million people using Instagram on a daily basis, you’ve probably noticed that Instagram Stories are a thing now.
It’s one thing if you don’t care about this as a user, but if you use Instagram for your marketing, Stories should definitely be on your radar – because the feature is already a hit.
(But first, for the uninitiated – what’s “Instagram Stories” mean, again? In three sentences or less, please.)
Instagram Stories is a way of sharing images and videos outside of your main Instagram feed. When you share something using this feature, it gets added to your “Story,” which is kind of like a little album that people can quickly flip through. The images and videos you add to your Story will stay there for 24 hours, and after that, they disappear....
Snapchat is arguably the most popular social media app around. But if you’re one of those folks who’s downloaded it to your smartphone and you're still not quite sure what to do (and you don’t want to ask one of the teenagers you know), here’s a quick getting-started guide to show you the basics.
What is Snapchat?
One of the things that Snapchat is best known for is the ephemeral nature of the content - you take a photo or video and send it to a friend and they have a limited number of seconds (up to 10 seconds maximum) to view the content before it disappears.
Before you send your snap, you can mark it up with text, stickers, or special lenses that give your selfie a silly look (big cartoon eyes, puking rainbows… it sounds odd but quickly becomes strangely charming)....
Snapchat on Wednesday unveiled Snapchat Memories, a new feature that lets users save and share snaps and other photos and video that they have saved to their phones. While some said Memories would make Snapchat more addictiveand others fretted that it would ruin the app’s spontaneity, the new functionality will also likely change how news organizations use the app. With Memories, users can save snaps and then edit and resend them to other users or add them to their Snapchat Story. Users can also now upload photos and video that they’ve shot outside of Snapchat. However, saved photos and videos that are uploaded as stories or snaps have a timestamp to show when they were originally taken. Users can access Memories by swiping up from the camera section of the app....
Snapchat, the one-to-one messaging app with more than 150 million daily active users, has earned a reputation for fast growth and innovation. But despite its success, it isn't the most user-friendly app I've ever played around with. Many of its best features are so buried within the app that a lot of people don't even know they exist. In March 2016, Snapchat added even more features in their release of a new version, and some of these features have totally reshaped how people use the app in the first place. For example, did you know that you can use Snapchat to make a live video call? Or that you can add emojis to your Snapchat videos -- and make it so they move and scale with specific objects? What about the trick where you can save data by turning the app on to "travel mode"? There are a whole lot of cool things you can do with Snapchat that you may not have known about. But before we jump into them, it's important that you know the basics. Already have the basics down? Read on for some more advanced tips and features. Note: Before getting started, make sure you're operating on the latest version of Snapchat. At the time of posting, the latest version is 9.33.0.0....
Snapchat is no longer just a private messaging tool for kids. Snapchat is a news platform, and it’s a platform for more than just the 20 media companies with precious spots in Discover, Snapchat’s dedicated professional media channel. Media companies big and small are using the Snapchat Stories feature, which allows you to create longer videos by piecing together photos and individual videos, each up to 10 seconds long. How Media Companies Are Using Stories Companies like The Hill and the Washington Post are using Snapchat Stories to cover political rallies; companies like The Skimm, Real Simple Magazine, CNBC, and CBS News are giving behind-the-scenes looks at their operations; and companies such as Mic, The Verge, and the Moscow outlet In the Now are using it to distribute original stories created just for Snapchat. And there’s a lot of crossover—most of the media companies I follow are still experimenting and have done all of these things and more. As social media strategist Barbara Kolbe Baker noted recently on her “Snaps by the Pond” channel, Stories have been so successful that they’re the target of Snapchat’s new ad rollout: Starting this week, advertisers can now buy ads between individual users’ Stories instead of being limited strictly to Snapchat Discover....
Snapchat combines the best of social networks, magazines, and television in a redesign of its omni-entertainment app.
You’ll now see image and headline previews of the content inside Discover channels and Live stories on the Stories page, instead of just logos for the publishers or events they capture. The Discover page now features a Pinterest-style mason grid of tiles, while the Stories page now combines the two rows of static Discover channels and Live Stories into one scrollable row of non-friend content.
Also, instead of having to dig your favorite Discover channels out of the whole list, you can now tap-and-hold to subscribe to them so they always appear amongst the Recent Stories from accounts you’ve added, unless you later unsubscribe. This gives publishers like Tastemade and IGN an extra call to action to bake into their Discover channels and marketing.
The goal here is to make professionally-made and community-curated content just as attractive as what friends share on the app. Previously, Discover channels felt bolted on to the experience, and can seem overly polished compared to Stories from friends that are fascinating despite flaws. VentureBeat and Recode previously reported that changes to the Discover page were coming....
Snapchat's daily user base grew by an estimated 36% since December 2015, at which time reports said it had 110 million DAU. Twitter does not officially break out its DAU numbers, but its monthly active user (MAU) numbers have been stagnating in the last year. In the first quarter of 2016, Twitter's user base grew just 3% YoY.
Despite this, Twitter still has two significant advantages over Snapchat.
First, Twitter's users engage with content, which is critical for publishers. Approximately 59% of Twitter users go to the social media platform for news content, according to new research from Pew. Users also engage with brands' content through Twitter. Coca-Cola, for example, has three million followers.
Snapchat users, on the other hand, primarily use the service for private communication with their friends and family. In fact, 71% of users only access the app in order to send photo and video chats to their peers, according to a Defy Media and variety survey....
Five years on, it's clear that Snapchat wasn't a gimmick. The company was recently valued at $16 billion and now has more than 100 million daily users who spend an average of half an hour on the app every day. And it's not just teens who love Snapchat. Although the service still skews toward the millennial set—60% of all 13- to 34-year-old smartphone users are on the platform—14% of Snapchat's user base is over 35. The fact that you know a snap is going to disappear makes you want to pay more attention to what you're watching. All of this results in 10 billion video views every single day. Many are personal messages sent and received between individuals, but these days, media companies and brands are competing for users' eyeballs as well. It might seem counterproductive for a company to invest in creating content that will be gone after 24 hours, but according to Bob Wolfley, who runs social media at the underwear company MeUndies, the fleetingness of these videos makes users more likely to be actively engaged with them. "We've been so trained by the constant rush of content on all these other social media networks that we mindlessly cycle through it to kill time," he says. "The fact that you know a snap is going to disappear makes you want to pay more attention to what you're watching. Snapchat does not have metrics for companies to track how effective their snaps have been for driving traffic and generating sales, but the brands Fast Company interviewed say that they have done their own little experiments. MeUndies, for instance, which has been on Snapchat for two years, has used a variety of methods to see how the audience is engaging with the brand. Wolfley has created vanity URLs to track if followers were going from Snapchat to the MeUndies website and has also launched several hidden sales campaigns to determine how many users used a specific promotion code. He is now convinced that Snapchat is the most impactful channel for introducing users to the brand and then getting them to make purchases. "We're getting more bang for our buck per follower than any other social media network," he says....
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Snapchat rolled out a new feature on its platform, World Lenses. The feature is similar to its already popular filters, with one key differentiator—augmented reality (AR). On the heels of that announcement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Facebook’s F8 conference and spoke about the future of AR, and the steps his company is taking. He then introduced an AR platform that will soon be available within Facebook’s Camera feature on smartphones. Surprising? Not really.It’s not like one company has dibs on which technology they’ll be using. And AR has been booming worldwide....
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays were the biggest days for brands posting Snapchat Stories in Q4 2016, according to a Snaplytics report. Moving away from Saturday’s dominance in Q3, each of the three day accounted for 17 per cent of weekly posts, with brands posting 13 Stories per month on average.
The report studied 217,000 posts from 500 brands in Q4, including 24,180 Stories. The average number of ‘snaps’ per Story was 11.3 – another figure that has risen, from 10.7 in Q1.
This led to a drop in average completion rate for Stories, however, down from 93 per cent in Q1 to 88 per cent in Q4. The verticals performing best for completion rate are travel & leisure and advertising & marketing, both at 91 per cent. At the bottom of the list are fashion & lifestyle and beauty, at 85 per cent.
Video accounted for 61 per cent of the content posted by brands on Snapchat. Video’s share steadily increased across the course of the year, up from 56 per cent in Q1 – but it is still the minority for some verticals....
In fact, according to Edison Research, Snapchat is the most popular social media app among Americans ages 12-24. Believe it or not, Snapchat is a marketing gold mine. And you don’t have to be selling Hello Kitty in order to reap the rewards: currently, 150 million people use the app to watch 10 billion videos daily, and that number only continues to rise. In the same Edison study, researchers found that Snapchat had more users than LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. It took four years for Twitter to grow as much as Snapchat grew in just one year. In this post, I’m going to break down applicable methods for marketing on Snapchat. It’s time to kick your brand up a notch....
This article contains the best Snapchat tricks, tips, hacks, and advice to take your snaps to the next level. Celebrity snapchats are going to have nothing on you (with the exception of that whole fame thing)! If you want to crush it in the creativity department and become the envy of your snapchat friends or if you want a shot at showing up when people start looking for the best snapchats to follow then you’re definitely in the right place. Oh, and you’ll definitely find a few suggestions here you haven’t seen anywhere else yet. What you won’t find here are tricks to save on battery life or data usage (Snapchat is a hog), or ways to secure your Snapchat account (even though that’s very important) or shady things like how to take a screenshot without anyone knowing (don’t do that). Depending on who you are and how much you use the app, some of these suggestions may seem like awesome bolts of idea lightning and others might seem like common sense. In either case, there’s one thing to keep in mind which might give you an edge over other Snapchat users looking for tricks and tips as well: new tricks usually surface after each Snapchat update. So that’s the time to start looking for new ideas to maintain your creative edge (and we’ll try to post anything good right here to keep you up to speed)...
SnapChat officially changed its name to Snap, Inc. as the company restyles itself from a one-[major] hit app company into a digital lifestyle brand. To mark the occasion, Snap, Inc. introduced Spectacles, fashion and tech-forward sunglasses that record 10-second clips, which can then be uploaded to SnapChat Memories via wifi. Following the Apple playbook, Snap, Inc. also designed a fashionable case that doubles as a charger. Spectacles will be available this Fall and will cost $130.
Spectacles are the result of a secret acquisition in December 2014 of VergenceLabs, which developed Epiphany Eyewear to record video clips with the press of a button on the side of the frame and upload them online via its app. Over the last 19 months, Snap, Inc. remodeled Epiphany into a fun, but thoughtful sunglass package to give Snappers a way to share their perspective hands-free.
By pressing a small button on the side of the glasses, Spectacles capture video through a 115-degree lens, which better conveys someone’s natural perspective and field of vision. Those on the other side of the lens, will know they’re being recorded because of a halo-like light that surrounds the lens. Unlike smartphones, which record video in a rectangular format, video via Spectacles is circular, allowing the viewer to watch the content naturally, whether in portrait or landscape mode, the way the user “saw” it. Essentially, clips offer a playback experience that simulates your natural point of view....
One of my fellow grad students tweeted that back on August 6, in the wake of Instagram cloning Snapchat’s features with their Stories function.
"The early numbers suggest another reality: Snapchat is here to stay."
Now we have numbers to show that this loyal sentiment is common among Snapchat’s core users.
BuzzFeed news reporter Alex Kantrowitz recently shared data from third party providers that “did not find any meaningful decline” in Snapchat’s metrics after the launch of Mark Zuckerberg’s latest attempt to challenge the king of ephemeral messaging.
“So for those who were quick to deem Instagram Stories a Snapchat killer, the early results suggest it may be wise to reconsider that label,” Kantrowitz wrote....
Instagram is taking a lot of heat for supposedly ripping off Snapchat with a "stories" feature of its own. And at first glance—hell, even at second and third glance—that’s exactly what it’s done: Stories lets you share photos and videos that disappear at the end of the day. But start using it and you begin to get the sense that it’s actually a much better experience from a user interface point of view.
Instagram is taking Snapchat's basic language and tinkering with the grammar, adding new expressions, and polishing up the prose.
In the subtlest of ways—so subtle that they’re easy to dismiss as blatant plagiarism—Instagram has made serious design improvements on Snapchat that are hidden in plain sight—er, swipe. Here’s how....
Even though Snapchat is said to have over 150 million daily users, many are still at a loss for where the app fits into their marketing plan. Think for a moment about some of your most embarrassing moments. Perhaps you fell off of a chair in the middle of a painfully hip, packed restaurant (me). Maybe you fell asleep in the middle of a meeting and got called out by your coworkers (me). Perchance you were at a professional development event at a colleague’s family cabin and broke the host’s hammock (spoiler alert: me). Whatever your most cringe-worthy moments, I bet you wish they could disappear forever after 10 seconds. This is what sets Snapchat apart. While it can’t erase embarrassing memories from your life, Snapchat’s fleeting nature has been both a blessing and a curse for brands using the image-sharing platform. With the maximum lifespan of a Snap being 24 hours, businesses and brands have had to approach marketing differently on the platform. To help you navigate these uncharted waters, we asked our community for their top Snapchat questions and answered them below....
Snapchat is now known as a platform for individuals and brands -- one that allows users to create quick, lighthearted, and even educational video content without using valuable production resources. For brands, this means a new opportunity to show off their culture, share knowledge, and connect with their audience in a new and exciting way. After reporting more than 100 million daily active users, and over 8 billion video views a day, we decided to give it a go: The official HubSpot Snapchat account launched in March 2016. And while we're still getting our feet wet, we've already learned a lot about executing and iterating a successful Snapchat business strategy. To help you get started, we've detailed everything we've learned (so far) below. We'll start by going over the basics -- how to set up an account, create a Snap, leverage effects, etc. -- and jump into some tips after that. ...
Wondering how to use Snapchat for your business?
Want to create deeper connections with your followers?
Snapchat can help you build an engaged following, increase loyalty, and boost your brand visibility.
In this article, you’ll discover 10 ways to use Snapchat for business.
If your company is still trying to figure out how to make the most of Facebook and Twitter, consider:
- WhatsApp has rapidly become the biggest messaging service in the world with more than a billion users.
- Snapchat is a juggernaut with the 18-24 age group, now earning more daily check-ins than Facebook. The company founder insists it is “not a social network.”
- Facebook is the social network for most of the world, yet their major investment is in the development of private Facebook Messenger, including bots that would help companies scale “human” interaction through the service. More than 900 million people use Messenger now. Other private messaging services like Viber and Kik have attracted millions of users.
Of the Fortune 100 companies, 77 use Slack. The average Slack user keeps the app running 10 hours a day, and is actively using it for over 2 hours a day. Instagram started private DM in 2014 that focuses on the sharing of content with up to 15 people in a threaded approach.
Twitter has experimented with Snapchat-style doodles and photo editing and in 2015 expanded the character limit via private direct messaging.
The movement of consumers from public social media to private messaging has been so rapid that Business Insider reported that the combined usage of the top four messaging apps now exceeds the combined usage of the top four social media apps. Falling data prices, cheaper devices, and improved features are helping propel this growth....
Snapchat Inc. has 150 million people using the service each day, said people familiar with the matter. That makes the four-year-old messaging app more popular than Twitter Inc. by daily active users. Snapchat has been growing quickly, boosted by its popularity among young people. The app had 110 million daily users in December, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak about the numbers. Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has less than 140 million users interacting with the service daily, according to an average of analysts’ estimates surveyed by Bloomberg. The short-messaging service was once the largest social network after Facebook Inc. but has since been surpassed by Facebook’s other apps, including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp....
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CNN's The Update arrives one month after the launch of Stay Tuned, the twice-daily Snapchat show from NBC News.