Is Snapchat’s latest update beneficial for your brand?

Planit Agency
December 14, 2017
Is Snapchat’s latest update beneficial for your brand? Featured Image

Finally! Snapchat has separated social from media. With this new update comes many features that can better help your business promote itself. How? Before the update, pictures and videos from a user’s friends got mixed in with content from brand publishers. Because of this, many brands struggled to be heard or even noticed by users. Snapchat’s new update is intended to eliminate this problem and to help brands get the engagement they need to be successful. So, what are these updates?

  1. The redesign of the Discover page

With the latest update, news and content from publishers, not friends, now lives on the Discover tab. Previously, this page was filled with Stories from all users, including friends, brands, businesses, and news publications. This page not only hosts content from brands, it’s also optimized to show users their favorite brand Stories.

So, what does that mean?

  1. The human touch

Unlike Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat’s new update uses an equal balance of reviews from human editors and an algorithm to provide users with the best content experience, generated specifically for them. This human review also protects users from being presented misinformation, eliminating the possibility of fake news. In all, because of this new review process, users’ Discover pages will only promote content they’re legitimately interested in. This will allow users to engage with that publisher’s content and will ultimately provide brands with more engagement.

But what if it doesn’t generate brands users prefer?

  1. Subscription location

The Discover page also hosts more than Stories that are generated algorithmically toward users. It also has Stories from brands that the user has subscribed to. This feature is located at the very top of the page, drawing the user’s eyes right to that brand or company. The benefit of this new update is that it allows users to see and quickly engage with their favorite publisher’s posts.

Are these updates enough to promote your brand?

Although this update is great, it needs work…

One of the reasons Snapchat created this update was for publishers to draw more attention and engagement from users. This can definitely be achieved for brands with hefty advertising budgets, but for smaller companies with a limited advertising budget, this update doesn’t provide great value. If you want to get to the top of a user’s Discover page, you have to be willing to drop some serious dough.

Before this update, all brands were getting drowned in a user’s friends’ Stories, and now, after the update, many small businesses are getting drowned in big brands’ Stories. Not great news for the smaller budget brands.

Big brands are still struggling with some aspects as well. Even with the update, there’s still not a feature for users to quickly search a publisher by name. In comparison, Facebook and Instagram both have easy search bars, which quickly allow users to locate a brand. This is an update that all brands, big and small, would truly benefit from. Snapchat has definitely taken a step in the right direction but has some work to do toward bringing awareness and engagement to all brands.