Why Snapchat Is Way More Important Than You Think + Infographic

If you’re annoyed by the fact that you’re reading another article about Snapchat, you’re in for a rough 2016.

Simply put, Snapchat is the new year’s social media darling, and it’s got more than just a train of hype and buzz to back it up: Snapchat has had several years now to hone its focus and functionality, and with major brands and media outlets (CNN, Daily Mail, MTV, People, Vice, and National Geographic, to name a few) distributing content on the platform, its emergence into the mainstream is all but inevitable.  Don’t worry, we’ll be getting into exactly what such brands are doing and how you can create great Snapchat content in just a few minutes.

On the surface, Snapchat is a video, image, and text messaging platform whose gimmick is that content only exists on it for a limited amount of time.  Look under the hood, however, and the app is revealed to be one of the most versatile, interesting content distribution platforms with a direct link to the coveted millennial demographic (don’t target millennials? It doesn’t matter, everyone and their great aunt will soon invade Snapchat like they did Facebook in 2013).

Why is it effective?  

More and more, consumers expect to be able to interact with brands in the same personal way they interact with other people.  This mindset has been birthed by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram’s hyper interactivity between brands and their followers, but those platforms still have the expectation of polished, highly professional content.

Snapchat, on the other hand, is made for quick, on-the-fly video and picture updates, with minimal editing tools built in.  The result is that consumers who have wanted to get to know brands behind the scenes for some time now have a platform built for exactly that type of raw, genuine, airbrush-free content creation.  And they f*¤%ing love it.  Engagement on Snapchat is really high.

But don’t take my word for it.

The good thing for both of us is that I don’t have to be the one convincing anyone to use the platform – experts have already made compelling cases I can draw from instead.

Over the past year, it has become unavoidable hearing about snapchat in the tech and social media sphere.  When a social media platform reaches the annoying, ubiquitous headline frequency that Snapchat has over the past few months, you can be sure that even the resisters, the hipsters, and the tech averse will give in and make an account before the year is out.

Here’s an infographic of some of Snapchat’s meaningful media coverage leading up to where we are now:

Engagement on Snapchat is obscenely high.

One of the major advantages of Snapchat is that users choose where their attention goes.

Think about this for a second:  When you post a tweet to your 10,000 follower twitter profile, maybe a couple thousand of them are online at any given time – if you’re lucky.  Of those, how many aren’t in messages, having conversations with others, or searching trending hashtags, so that their attention is actually completely removed from the stream where your message will be displayed?  A few hundred?

It gets worse:  How many people who see your tweet actually read your tweet, rather than just scrolling past it?  This kind of attention chop down means that, regardless of what analytics tell you about your ‘impressions’, your actual engagement and those who take in your message are very few compared to what you might expect from at-a-glance broad reach numbers.

On Facebook, your posts aren’t even served up to everyone who follows you anymore because Facebook recognizes just how much content is scrolling past everyone’s feed.

Snapchat is different from its social peers.  

Everyone who views a story, picture, video, or text chat of yours – don’t worry, we’ll get to how-to’s and definitions in a minute – is choosing to do so; that person has to tap your name intentionally to view your snap, which pops up in full screen, meaning they’re not just looking at whatever you post in a clutter of 11 other messages on their screen at the same time.  No, you’re getting 100% of their screen real estate to deliver your message or update.

And, because Snapchat limits content to micro updates of 10 seconds or less, it’s a low investment for people to tap every update that comes their way and then watch every second of it.  And they do.  If you have 1,000 followers on Snapchat and your content doesn’t completely suck, it’s a safe bet that 500-900 of them are going to watch what you put out.  By choice.  With undivided attention and full screen real estate.  That’s insane.

Creating half decent Snapchat content will blow the attention you receive from other platforms right out of the water.  Creating great Snapchat content will put you in an engagement league you’ve probably never seen before.

So, how do you get started killin’ it with Snapchat?  I thought you’d never ask.



“If you’re annoyed by the fact that you’re reading another article about Snapchat, you’re in for a rough 2016.”