Snapchat may help you snap up new business

Have you heard of Snapchat? Your kids have. The multimedia-sharing platform that allows users to send 1 to 10-second pictures or videos before they self-destruct exploded among millennials when it launched in September 2011. It has since remained the number one ranked and used app by youth with 81% of US teens using it each month and 39% rating it as their favorite app.

Snap Inc. is hoping to use this popularity to bolster its advertising platform, Snap Ads, by offering discounts to businesses that use Snap employees to format their ads to fit the application screen. If you are unfamiliar, the Snapchat app runs photos and videos only in a vertical orientation which may cause some frustration or hours of extra editing for a typical landscape-oriented advertisement.

Snap Ads is luring small businesses by reimbursing the formatting costs of their adverts by either $1,500 or 1% of the overall budget (whichever is greater) when a business spends more than $40,000. This method of reaching out to advertisers via an incentive offer is not new to social media. Facebook and Instagram successfully entice businesses that are on the fence on spending, by asking them to try out new ad formats, experience the positive results, then spend more on advertising in the long run.

Still wondering if this applies to you or your business? As of May 2017 Snapchat has 166 million daily active users. Although still behind Instagram which logs 600 million and Facebook which is an astounding 1.33 billion, Snapchat offers the unique ability to target millennials who are the nation’s largest living generation at 75.4 million, as well.

Using Snap Ads may also afford your company the unique opportunity to reach a younger audience who are known to spend more on comforts and conveniences than other generations by being silly, casual, or funny with your advertisements which may not be possible in your other campaigns.