Some of you may have heard the news that recently Snapchat, the popular self-destructing social network, has set it’s cross-hairs on duplicating Facebook’s advertising methods in a bid to replicate it’s meteoric rise, aiming to become the social media for brands and advertisers.
A few years ago Snapchat declined Facebook’s generous offer to purchase the social media app for approximately $3 billion in favour of developing itself as a competitor. Since then it seems Snapchat has been vindicated; since the offer back in 2013 Snapchat has risen from 60 million users to 100 million, while Facebook’s attempt to replicate Snapchat with it’s version “Poke” failed miserably.
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Strangely though, even with this incredible rise in users, only a few brands have chosen to use Snapchat as a method of reaching a younger audience. According to businessofapps.com, this number stands at less than of 1% of advertisers. Parts of this I can understand, with limited metrics compared to other social media sites and the staggering cost of $750,000 for a brand to advertise. This, however, doesn’t put it out of the running. Audi famously used Snapchat during the Superbowl to talking about anything but the Superbowl. This led to 100,000 views, 2,400 twitter mentions and 37 million impressions online, with major partnership enquiries on a scale never before seen by Audi.
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In a bid to improve their advertising for brands, Snapchat plans to implement the following strategy which mimics Facebook’s offering:
- Targeting content at users depending on their interest on “discover” topics, external sites and browsing history.
- Better metrics for advertisers showing real conversions and proof of money brought in.
- Analysis of people’s past interests and create a news feed hierarchy with ads.
- Paid priority for brands.
These changes will affect the price naturally, which is already incredibly high and may potentially drive users down if they feel their being flooded with ads. The slow decline of Facebook users should be a hint to Snapchat that their targeting will affect their predominately younger audience who are notorious for being private.
Snapchat plans to unveil these changes later this year. So I guess we will have to wait and see if their big plans take into consideration the users who made it what it is.
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