Snapchat: The Underrated Social Media Marketing Platform

I grew up using Snapchat. The ease of use and new ways to communicate made it almost more popular to use than texting in my high school. For those of you who may not know, it gives you the option to take a picture or video and send it to one person or whole group of people. It’s free of charge to send messages, which some find more appealing because all you need is to be connected to Wi-Fi or data. You can also chat and video call. Many people share pictures on their story (all your followers can see those) and some even share on the public story for the area they live in. Snapchat has “spotlight” reels as well, which mimic TikTok but are less user friendly. Finally, Snapchat has a feature called “Snap Maps” where users can see where everyone is that shares their location with them.

Influencers on Snapchat tend to have a yellow star by their name and in order to keep a solid presence, they post virtually their entire day on Snapchat. Some will post video or picture testimonials to sell their product or advertise other company’s products. Most will post the location of where they’re at. For example, if they found an amazing food truck, they’d snap a picture and attach the location so others could know where to find it. Many people post on their private story or if they’re an influencer on their public story, various polls. Snapchat gives the user the option to make a poll and have people vote thumbs up or thumbs down based on how they feel.

According to the “Essentials of Social Media Marketing” textbook, the entirety of users that have Snapchat hold a whopping $4.4 trillion in spending power. This is most likely the reason there are so many ads on this social media platform. There’s options to make single image/video ads, collection ads (a series of available products to purchase shows up at the bottom of the ad), use of lenses/filters and even Snapchat bidding. There is a Snap ad dashboard that allows brands to monitor their campaign performance, online behavior/engagement and additional tools to continue optimizing the user’s existing campaigns. Personally, the collection ads make me click on the ad the most because the available products are easily accessible and there are many options right in front of me. I’ve also noticed that recently when I click through stories, all ads I stumble across have the same exact format, with the product website at the bottom available to click. I think it would benefit Snapchat if they kept a variety of ads available instead of making all of them the exact same.

In conclusion, Snapchat has proven to be a very underrated social media marketing platform. This is because they have multiple ad formats, easy and effective ad placement techniques and it’s a free app drawing many users.