Through our partnership with St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, we meet extremely talented MBA students and social media marketing professionals. One of their assignments in our course is to blog on an area of social media that they found most interesting or learned the most about in their studies. We are proud to highlight some of the best of those submissions here.
There are so many creative ways you can use social media platforms, above and beyond how a lot of businesses use it: posting some text of their product and a static image. Facebook launched a live video option where users can engage people by showing what’s happening in real time. You can also create and act out an entire story line in just a couple of minutes to reach more fans. Twitter offers dynamic ways to interact with and attract more followers through TweetStorms and Twitter Moments. As Alfred Lua says in his Buffer blog: ”Being authentic is a key aspect of storytelling, and there’s no other way to be more “real” than going live to engage with your audience.” This is true for the everyday person interacting over social media and for businesses looking to connect with core groups of consumers.
Many companies are familiar with and have accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to promote their businesses. Snapchat, though, is a little bit of unchartered territory for business use. But Snapchat offers a huge opportunity to reach a captive audience – especially the millennial generation. Sydney Parker tells us in her how-to-Snapchat-for-business blog: Snapchat’s more than 173 million daily active users watch 10 billion videos every day, which suggests big opportunities for brands and marketers.
Admittedly, Snapchat is a platform I’m rarely on for personal use, much less business. And, I’ve struggled to think of ways it could be relevant for company use. If you think of it in the stereotypical sense –posting awkward, entertaining selfies (with fun filters) and photos of your food – then it probably doesn’t make sense for most businesses. However, there are several features of Snapchat that would be ideal for marketing purposes. One of these is Geofilters. This feature allows a Snapchatter to share time and place in their Snap or story using a company’s unique Geofilter. In her HubSpot marketing blog, Sophia Bernazzani recommends using a Geofilter from an interesting place relevant to your brand to give the brand personality and drive its cool factor.
A company can also use Snapchat to launch contests or giveaways. Create a Snapchat Story showing details of a treasure hunt to find where exclusive products are hidden. Or, as Katie Talbot suggest in her Social Media Examiner article, offer promo codes for taking selfies while holding your product.
Another feature of Snapchat is its hyperlapse and slow motion video capability. This feature allows you to make your Snapchat Story shorter or to break down an interesting process your followers might want to see. As a marketer for a company that builds concrete mixers and garbage trucks, I could try hyperlapse to show part of a build process for one of these big trucks.
Finally, I can tell my boss a way we can use Snapchat!
Author: Kelli McConahey
Kelli McConahey is a marketing manager for the Refuse Collection Vehicles business segment at McNeilus Truck & Manufacturing. She has a Bachelor of Science in Mass Communications, News-Editorial from St. Cloud State University and a Master’s in Business Administration from St. Mary’s University of Minnesota. She lives in Rochester, MN, with her husband, Brent, and 10-month-old daughter, Harley.
Connect with her via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin
Really interesting to know more about Snapchat facts. Awesome! Snapchat’s more than 173 million daily active users watch 10 billion videos every day, which suggests big opportunities for brands and marketers. Thank you for information sharing.