Snapchat By: Josh Kaczmarek
Snapchat • Launched in July 2011 • Allows users to take photos or 10 second video clips and send them to people • Add text • Add drawings • Disappears after time limit expires • Upload pictures and video clips to your story"
Snapchat • Demographics: – Male and female users – Typically between the ages of 13 and 27
• Target audience: – College age group • 77% of surveyed college kids use Snapchat daily • 45% of college students would open a Snapchat from a brand they didn t know • 73% of college students would open a Snapchat from a brand they did know – (BusinessInsider.com)
GrubHub Case Study • Time and dedication • Fresh ways to engage their audience – Offer discounts – Embrace two way engagement – Intern recruitment – Screenshot game – Scavenger hunt
GrubHub Case Study • Scavenger Hunt Day 1: Food Doodle Day 2: Food Bombing Day 3: Screenshot & Share on Social
Day 4: Food 4 Thought Day 5: Food Selfie
Audi and The Onion Case Study • Audi sought to gain attention for Super Bowl Sunday • Co-created funny snaps • People loved it – Told their followers on other social media platforms – Audi s Snapchat received over 100,000 views • 9,600 new followers
Campaign
Gap • Demographics – Young, diverse audience – Females mostly, but males too
• Snapchat is a great fit for Gap – Gap s target audience falls in the demographics of Snapchat users.
Contest • #FittingRoomPhotoshoot! – Send snaps of a mirror selfie in a fitting room to Gap – Gap awards users who send snaps with the best arranged outfits • Winners will win a $100 gift card to Gap
Insight to New Merchandise • 10 second clips of associates setting up displays • First look – Preview of the new essentials for the upcoming season
Scavenger Hunt • Take a picture with any associate and receive a discount – Anyone who participates wins
• Discount will be anything between 10% and 50%
More Uses for Snapchat • Insight to what it s like to be a team member or a part of the Gap family • Videos that engage the consumers and show off the brand • Manage a crisis
Conclusion • Snapchat is revolutionizing social media • Snapchat can be used for many different things • Very engaging • Wildly used across the nation
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Snapchat Case Study: Research and Campaign By: Josh Kaczmarek
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Table of Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1
What is Snapchat?............................................................................................................... 1
Research…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 2
Snapchat…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2
GrubHub Case Study………………………………………………………………………………….. 4
Audi and The Onion Case Study………………………………………………………………….. 5
16 Handles Case Study……………………………………………………………………………….. 6
Campaign……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 7
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………... 9
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 11
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Introduction Social media are tools and applications that allow people to produce and share information or thoughts about certain content or events in virtual communities and different online networks.
Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, both marketing
professors at the ESCP Europe business school and authors of The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media, define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of the [World Wide Web], and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (61). They both mention how there are different types of social media and that creators are constantly looking for different outlets to express themselves. Social media is good for any brand in the sense that it calls out to people and engages them in a way that they have never been engaged before. The main thing that differentiates a brand’s online presence is the way they use social media. Social media is good for calling attention to new information, a product, or event, but consumers want a call to action. They want to know what they can do to be a part of the story and a part of the brand’s success.
What is Snapchat? Snapchat is a social media platform that was first launched in July 2011. It was developed by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown all while studying at Stanford University. This application allows users to take photos and 10 second video clips and send them to people who are on their “Friends List.” Users can add text and drawings to the photos and videos. Along with all this, users can set a specific time limit
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(ranging from one second to 10 seconds) for their “snaps;” after the time limit is up, the picture or video will disappear from the recipient’s device. Snapchat recently allowed for people to change their settings so that recipients can “replay” the “snap,” but never allow them to save the content in its entirety. Replays are only available for the amount of time the snap remains in the recipient’s feed. One thing that has been heavily reported in the past is people “screenshotting” the pictures or stills of the video since there is no other way of saving the “snap’s” full content; this allows for people to capture the still before it disappears forever. Fortunately, the application notifies the user when the recipient takes a screenshot. Snapchat also allows for people to update their “story;” this is when users upload their “snaps” to a section called “My Story,” which allows for people see the content for 24 hours. After the 24 hours is over, the “snaps” disappear and cannot be retrieved. The application’s main target audience is young adults from 18 to 23 but have a wider demographic consisting of people between the ages of 13 and 27. In October of 2012, the application recognized an older user base over the age of 40.
Research Snapchat: Snapchat is a very interesting social media outlet. The target audiences for Snapchat are users in the college age group. Due to some unusual and unwanted cases of sexual exploration with this application, Snapchat has made it known that they are seeking a young adult age group for legal reasons. This is beneficial to many brands because their target audience might consist of young adults. According to Business Insider, “77% of surveyed college kids use Snapchat everyday” (businessinsider.com).
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This number helps show that the amount of young adults using this unique social media platform is high; it showcases that Snapchat has a large activity rate among young adults, which is appealing to any brand with that target audience. Due to its popular success and new features, users believe that Snapchat will become one of the most used and commonly known outlets that will ever be offered as social media platform.
Another portion of this study focused on how college students react to brands postings on Snapchat. Typically, on other social media sites, you can skip and jump past the promoted posts. But, on Snapchat, the promoted posts stay in your feed until they are either viewed or exited out of; this makes the user actually pay attention to the brand and gives them a decision on either to view it and give it more attention or simply close it out.
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GrubHub Case Study: GrubHub did a fantastic job when engaging their audience. They reached out to consumers and got a lot of responses. Due to the amount of responses, some brands may be intimidated to take on such a task but GrubHub showcased the perfect way to handle a lot of responses: make a Snapchat team. Based on a case study arranged by KC Geen, the Senior Manager of Social Media at both GrubHub and Seamless, it was concluded that there were many different factors that made their Snapchat activity a success. GrubHub made a team that dedicated a lot of their time to managing new posts and responding to users who reached out to them. Their team consists of artists, marketing strategists, story tellers, and copywriters. This team is essential to GrubHub’s success on Snapchat. Some of the things that they did to engage their audience were: •
Offer discounts
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Conduct scavenger hunts o Five day challenge: !
Day One: Food Doodle
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Day Two: Food Bombing
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Day Three: Screenshot and Share on Social Media
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Day Four: Food for Thought
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Day Five: Food Selfie •
Surprised participants by offering 10 random winners $50 in Free Gub for each challenge
o #SnapHunt: Screenshot Game !
Users were asked to screenshot anything they saw that said “bacon” 4
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Fans emailed the screen shots for a chance to win Free Grub
Embrace two way engagement o Responded to users who sent them “snaps” and helped create personal relationships with their consumers
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Recruit potential interns o Made the process much more fun and engaging to its audience The main thing to remember about GrubHub and their incredible success with
Snapchat is that they understood what it took for the platform to be successful for them. It is very work intensive and it forces team members go through a manual process rather than an artificial, scripted interface. Audi and The Onion Case Study: About two weeks before Super Bowl Sunday, Audi asked Huge, the luxury carmaker’s social media agency, to come up with a new idea for an online marketing campaign to gain the attention of millennials of their Super Bowl presence. Audi was trying to maintain its high level position of marketing and engagement by the use of a new, upcoming platform social media platform: Snapchat. By this time, very few brands ever used Snapchat.
It made sense to target
millennials through this platform considering that is the majority of its users. Based on Huge’s online article, “Audi Takes Snapchat by Storm on Super Bowl Sunday,” Audi teamed up with The Onion to co-create messages and images for snaps that “poked fun at the banality of [a] typical Sunday and joked about real-time aspects of the game and the halftime show” (hugeinc.com). People loved it. People were a huge fan of it and mentioned it on other social media sites. Advertising Age reported that Audi drove “the most mentions of any online automaker 5 !
during the Super Bowl, one third of which resulted from the Snapchat campaign.” Twitter users were showing the private snaps publicly to their followers and made claims that “the snaps from Audi were the only enjoyable part of the Super Bowl.” Along with that, Audi’s Twitter following grew by 2,500 followers and their Facebook likes increased by 9,000. The campaign itself received 100,000 total views on Snapchat and produced about 2,400 mentions on Twitter. In addition to that, the campaign also received “a total of 37 million social impressions” (hugeinc.com). As it was mentioned in the GrubHub Case Study, Snapchat is very work intensive; but it certainly pays off in the end. The team manually added about 9,600 followers to the Audi Snapchat account over a two-day period and increased their followers by over %1000 finishing with a little over 10,500 followers. 16 Handles Case Study: 16 Handles was the first recorded brand to use Snapchat. They used it to help drive customers directly after the New Year. Considering that the weather is typically freezing around that time, 16 Handles knew that they needed to use this social media platform to talk to their consumers and get the consumers to talk about them. Advertising Age wrote an article called, “Brands Experiment With PhotoMessaging Service Snapchat, Facebook Poke,” which fixated on the brand’s success while using the platform. The campaign itself was focused on giving discounts. All the customers had to do was send a “snap” of them tasting any of the frozen yogurt flavors to the brand’s username: Love16Handles. After 16 Handles received the “snap,” they would reply with a discount of anything ranging between 15% and 100% off of the consumer’s entire purchase.
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The only downfall to this was that the consumer had to show the team members the “snap” that included the discount as they were paying. It was a nice surprise but it also received a lot of reluctance from the consumers. Many people were concerned that they either weren’t going to receive a “snap” with the discount or that they were going to accidentally open it before showing the cashier. Considering that 16 Handle did not make use of the “replay” option located in their settings, many consumers were concerned that they were not going to receive the discount if they prematurely opened the “snap;” in the description of how the campaign works, they said that the “offer [would] disappear after 10 seconds” (adage.com). This made consumers believe that screenshots were not considered valuable even though they participated in the coupon contest. One action that would have eliminated this issue would have been to activate the “replay option” and to mention that the “snap” would still be considered valid if they either replayed it for the cashier or showed them a screenshot of the “snap” coupon. This campaign was a great way to create buzz for the brand. It made people talk about them in a way that interested other potential consumers.
This campaign was
definitely beneficial to 16 Handles because it allowed them to establish a personal relationship with their consumers. They engaged their customers and received a nice fan base on their Snapchat platform.
Campaign !
Gap would be a great brand to make use of Snapchat. Gap has a young, diverse
audience that would be able to enjoy and participate in any of their campaigns on social media. Considering that their target audience falls in the demographics for typical Snapchat users, it seemed like a perfect fit. Their consumers are ones that evolve when 7 !
their brand evolves. Also, the majority of Gap shoppers or people who are aware of the brand are in the age group that typically uses Snapchat to communicate with family and friends; this will help Gap provide a way to create a relationship that they have never had with their consumers before. Snapchat is used in many different ways by many different brands. Yet, one thing that they all have in common is establishing a unique and unheard of relationship with their consumers. Gap could utilize this social media platform in a way to help showcase that they are socially aware and up to date with their consumers. Many consumers would shy away from brands that don’t keep their loyal consumers socially and personally updated. Based on what we have seen from the previous case studies, there are many different ways that brands can utilize social media. Snapchat has been proven to be an engaging way to relay messages to the public. Here are some ways that brands can operate Snapchat: •
Contests o #FittingRoomPhotoshoot could be a trended hashtag announced via Twitter. People can send “snaps” to Gap’s account of them taking mirror pictures of them trying on new clothes and other merchandise. Gap can award the top five users who showcased the best outfits $100 gift cards to any of their retail stores.
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Insight to new merchandise and services o Provide ten second clips of associates setting up new displays showcasing their new products. This will give their users an exclusive “first look” on what they have to offer for the upcoming season. 8
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Discounts and coupons o Scavenger Hunt: Find an associate and take a picture with them to win a discount. Every participant will receive a discount just for participating. The discounts will provide somewhere between 10 and 50% off of the consumer’s entire purchase.
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Insight to what it’s like to be a team member or apart of the Gap community o Introduce new team members and showcase why they like being a part of the Gap family. o Showcase what the Gap community does and how they effectively promote and make change
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Videos that engage the consumers and show off the brand o Vine or Instagram styled videos work really well for this
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Manage a crisis o “Breaking News” style content that can help relay key messages to the consumers and fans of the brand
All of these examples are different ways that Gap could utilize Snapchat and successfully engage their audience. Once they talk to their audience in a familiar way, they are more likely to get a response.
Conclusion In closing, Snapchat is revolutionizing social media as a whole. It was discovered that Snapchat could be used for many different things, whether it be hiring new employees or interns, or putting on contests for its loyal fans. It’s very engaging and widely used across the nation.
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It has all the right components to make the Gap campaign successful. It is a very effective application that has the power to reach out to new, old, and loyal consumers in the young-adult demographics. It will allow Gap to talk to their consumers on a new level. It will also energize their consumers and get them to participate with the activities being held via the Snapchat account.
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Works Cited Geen, KC. “Snapchat Case Study: GrubHub.” GrubHub and Seamless. Chicago, IL. 2 June. 2014. Web. 5 Dec. 2014. Haenlein, Michael and Kaplan, Andreas. Users of the World Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media. Kelly School of Business. Science Direct. 2010. Web. 4 Dec. 2014 McGermott, John. “Brands Experiment with Photo-Messaging Service Snapchat, Facebook Poke.” Advertisement Age. 4 Jan. 2013. Web. 4 Dec. 2014. Shontell, Alyson. “77% of Surveyed College Kids Use Snapchat Every Day.” Business Insider. 25 Feb. 2014. Web. 5 Dec. 2014. “Audi Takes Snapchat by Storm on Super Bowl Sunday.” Huge Inc. 31 Jan. 2014. Web. 4 Dec. 2014 ! ! !
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