Brands Are Coming to Snapchat. Will Users Disappear?

What's This?

By Seth Fiegerman2014-01-10 00:30:52 UTC

The first snap was more of a bang: a panda with a gun to its head and a gift-wrapped box to the right. The background was black with dozens of crudely-drawn colorful lines.

That image might sound confusing or even frightening, but not to Snapchat users following the newly created account for HBO's hit show Girls. The three emoticons featured in its first post last week — a panda, pistol and package — are a throwback to a bizarre text message sent by one of the characters in the show's second season. The Girls account has since posted pictures teasing the season premiere and sharing snippets from the cast on the red carpet.

Joining forces with Snapchat to target a younger demographic seems like an obvious move, but it took some convincing for Girls to get onto the platform. For the past eight months or so, the team at HBO has been keeping an eye on Snapchat's growth and weighing how to take advantage of messages that disappear after 10 seconds. When Snapchat introduced Stories — a collection of posts or "snaps" that can be seen for 24 hours — in October, HBO finally saw a way in.

See also: 8 Brands Rocking Snapchat

"I think it was the launch of the Stories feature that really solidified for us that there was a way to use this platform as marketers," Sabrina Caluori, VP of social media and marketing at HBO. "Prior to the launch of that, we struggled to come up with creatives that could be impactful."

Snapchat launched more than two years ago and rocketed into the mainstream last year after Facebook tried and failed to kill it, but brands have been slow to embrace the platform. A few, like Taco Bell and 16 Handles, created accounts in early 2013. After the introduction of Stories, however, brand activity started to increase.

A Snapchat post from the Girls account

The New Orleans Saints use the Stories feature to share behind-the-scenes footage of its games. Taco Bell has used it to share funny sequences of people making taco runs. Juicy Couture turned to Snapchat to preview collections and highlight photo shoots. And Seventeen , which joined last month, brings in celebrities like One Direction to engage with fans from its account.

Even businesses like NPR and Bloomberg Businessweek, which one might not immediately associate with Snapchat's target audience, have taken to the platform. Businessweek joined this week and plans to start using its account to preview covers. NPR, which signed up in late October, has been using the service to share one "unforgettable" fact each day from its newsroom as well as 10-second book and movie reviews and footage from its Tiny Desk concerts.

"Some people listen to a podcast once a week, some people follow us on Tumblr and engage that way," says Melody Kramer, digital strategist and associate editor at NPR. "This is another way to reach people who would be interested in NPR's content."

Kramer refers to NPR's participation on Snapchat as an "experiment," and as she points out, it doesn't really quire too much of an investment. "It's a 10- to 15-second time commitment for me on a daily basis," she says. "It's fun and a lot of people in the newsroom are enjoying it."

Disappearing Metrics

While the time commitment for brands running a Snapchat account may be low, the payoff is uncertain at best.

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which have built-in engagement metrics like Retweets, Followers and Likes, not to mention more detailed reports they can provide advertisers, the only thing Snapchat users know about their posts is whether they are viewed or not. Multiple brands we spoke with confessed that they don't have a great picture of how individual posts perform and some say they actually look to other networks like Twitter for feedback to see how many people are sharing screengrabs of snaps.

"It's kind of hard to tell," Kramer said. "We do get responses, but we get responses regardless of whether or not we are posting."

Snapchat has yet to monetize its platform. CEO Evan Spiegel has suggested that when it does, it might be through in-app purchases first and then some form of native advertising later. Perhaps for that reason, Snapchat hasn't felt the need to provide brands with better tools to track analytics or manage accounts.

Snapchat post highlighting one "unforgettable" fact of the day

Andrew Cunningham, community manager for Huge, a digital agency, says that Snapchat has "definitely been a top consideration" for brands he's work with recently, but there is some frustration about a lack of "business friendly features" like making it easier to send custom responses to users and have multiple phones tied to one account.

One potentially positive sign for brands can be found in HBO's experience. Shortly after HBO announcing that it had joined, Snapchat's team reached out to the Girls team to compliment their use of the platform. Caluori says her team asked Snapchat for some data points, and Snapchat obliged by providing them with their total friend account and letting them see how it compared to other brands on the service.

It's not much, but the move suggests Snapchat is willing to embrace and cater to at least some brands, paving the way for better relations down the road if and when it introduces ads.

Users vs. Brands

Brands will likely continue to flock to the platform, whether Snapchat embraces them or not.

"Most brands are interested at this point, from what I've experienced," Cunningham says. "Just because of its very rapidly growing user base and there's so much potential there, it's sort of a hot topic." He also touts the fact that Snapchat users tend to pay closer attention to each post because they have to hold their fingers to the screen to view it, "which is pretty attractive from a brand perspective."

As more brands — and potentially advertising — arrive on Snapchat, the service could start to resemble Facebook and Twitter in ways that users might not like. But that doesn't mean users will start to disappear like the snaps.

"Is advertising or brand participation going to ruin the Snapchat experience? We can look at what happened to other social networks and it hasn't," says Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. That said, Blau argues that brands will need to rethink their traditional advertising in order to cater to Snapchat's younger demographic.

"If it's blatant and outright advertising... it's not something that's going to impact [teens]. They are more influencers of spending, than spending themselves," he says. "But if they are able to interact with their favorite characters and stars, maybe it's not such a hardcore advertising as you would see with a display ad, and that may be more accommodating for them."

Image: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images

Topics: Apps and Software, Business, Marketing, snapchat