The Rise of Snapchat Marketing

Stephen McCance October 8, 2014

Snapchat has seen a rise in it’s story feature, but can this be used in marketing? We look at the rising culture of the ‘Snapchat Celebrity’ and how brands are waking up to the idea of using these individuals in their digital marketing campaigns.

It’s been almost a year since social media giant Snapchat launched their ‘Snapchat Stories’ feature, it turned a photo messaging app into a social network and changed the way in which people would use it completely.

According to an article published on the verge, Snapchat Stories is one of the most popular features with 1 billion ‘stories’ viewed per day. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that this started to gain the attention of the big companies.

Snapchat also caught onto the trend too. It launched a feature called ‘Our Story’ at an event called EDC Live. The feature allowed Snapchat users, via their location functions, to log into an event and contribute to a Snapchat Story that everybody else at the event was contributing to. This allowed users to get their snaps and videos viewed by a wider audience, it was also great PR for the event too.

A new thing is rising out of the Snapchat success story too. It’s the notion of the ‘Snapchat Celebrity’ and at the forefront of this new wave of content sharing, is Shaun McBride.

“I think brands are starting to notice now that they can put something on Instagram or Facebook, but the youth isn’t on Facebook, and if they’re on Instagram, they’re going to just scroll past it,” He told Forbes magazine: “But with Snapchat you have their undivided attention, they’re holding down the screen, and it’s awesome. When else does that demographic spend seven seconds just soaking something in? They don’t. They’re too fast. So I think Snapchat really nails that.”

Rather than it just be a selection of random disconnected snaps and video clips from the last 24 hours detailing various things in your day and a quick picture of your toast from breakfast, McBride developed a way in which to use the stories feature of the app to create an actual story which all links together in an entertaining manner.

While this seems like a simple thing to put together, brands are willing to pay up to $30,000 to get him, or some of the other new ‘Snapchat Celebrities’, hoping to reach the smartphone wielding millenial in the influential 13-25 year old bracket. The Snapchat Celebrity demographic is being filled up with individuals who had considerable followings on video sharing platform Vine but are looking for something new.

According to Forbes, McBride can make up to “several thousand dollars” per image. With that kind of money being thrown at this type of service, it’s almost guaranteed that consumers will see a jump in the so-called ‘Snapchat Celebrity’ in the next year or so. But will it survive this influx?

“We kind of know what Vine became – Vine is for comedy,” Said Jerome Jarre, Vine Star and co-founder of GrapeStory, a talent agency that helps brands and social media stars connect: “For Snapchat it’s unknown. If Snapchat succeeds at not being only comedy, then it can win mobile – I think Snapchat has the power to be the YouTube on mobile.”