This Snapchat Article Won’t Disappear

In October, we told you about Snapchat’s updates and the ways brands can take advantage of them. Since then, it’s become an even bigger tool for agencies and brands and is poised to grow in importance in 2016. Social change organizations should evaluate whether they’re taking advantage of the portal’s strengths and capitalizing on its ability to create fun, shareable and engaging content.

Snapchat’s allure is its disappearing posts, which lets brands and organizations have a bit more fun with posts compared to the traditional social media portals, which leave a larger footprint. David Bekowitz, chief marketing officer of MRY summed it up well, “On Snapchat, the risks are a lot lower. It’s a place where we can experiment and have some fun.” While fun is encouraged, it’s imperative not to go off brand, and for social change organizations, that brand equity carries even more weight than many organizations with less social cachet.

Many companies and organizations have turned to Snapchat as a business development and recruiting portal. Pivoting that mindset slightly lets social change organizations use Snapchat as an awareness and engagement tool. Equate job candidate with potential brand ambassador and business development as a growth engine.

Taking advantage of the fun ethos that the portal allows enables social change organizations a tremendous opportunity to show off the people behind the scenes in a fun, yet engaging way. Social change organizations’ employees are often the core of the organization and the unique differentiator, so showing them off in a powerful way will help build more engaged advocates that ultimately leads to further activation offline.

Snapchat also skews the youngest of all social media portals, so it presents organizations with a great opportunity to hit a different demographic. That new audience is active and thirsty for content. Just think, according to e-consultancy, nearly 9000 images are shared per second, so content is available and there is a clear hunger for it.

Snapchat, though, is not without its risks and challenges. Building an audience on Snapchat, especially an engaged audience, takes a lot more work than traditional social media portals like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It also takes more creativity. After all, when content disappears, it’s paramount that it is consumed within its short life cycle. Despite the challenges, Snapchat offers organizations tremendous opportunities and it should be strongly considered in your 2016 content strategy.