Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Snapchat is now known as a platform for individuals and brands -- one that allows users to create quick, lighthearted, and even educational video content without using valuable production resources. For brands, this means a new opportunity to show off their culture, share knowledge, and connect with their audience in a new and exciting way.

After reporting more than 100 million daily active users, and over 8 billion video views a day, we decided to give it a go: The official HubSpot Snapchat account launched in March 2016. And while we're still getting our feet wet, we've already learned a lot about executing and iterating a successful Snapchat business strategy.

To help you get started, we've detailed everything we've learned (so far) below. We'll start by going over the basics -- how to set up an account, create a Snap, leverage effects, etc. -- and jump into some tips after that. ...

Five years on, it's clear that Snapchat wasn't a gimmick. The company was recently valued at $16 billion and now has more than 100 million daily users who spend an average of half an hour on the app every day. And it's not just teens who love Snapchat.

Although the service still skews toward the millennial set—60% of all 13- to 34-year-old smartphone users are on the platform—14% of Snapchat's user base is over 35.

The fact that you know a snap is going to disappear makes you want to pay more attention to what you're watching.

All of this results in 10 billion video views every single day. Many are personal messages sent and received between individuals, but these days, media companies and brands are competing for users' eyeballs as well. It might seem counterproductive for a company to invest in creating content that will be gone after 24 hours, but according to Bob Wolfley, who runs social media at the underwear company MeUndies, the fleetingness of these videos makes users more likely to be actively engaged with them.

"We've been so trained by the constant rush of content on all these other social media networks that we mindlessly cycle through it to kill time," he says. "The fact that you know a snap is going to disappear makes you want to pay more attention to what you're watching.

Snapchat does not have metrics for companies to track how effective their snaps have been for driving traffic and generating sales, but the brands Fast Company interviewed say that they have done their own little experiments.

MeUndies, for instance, which has been on Snapchat for two years, has used a variety of methods to see how the audience is engaging with the brand. Wolfley has created vanity URLs to track if followers were going from Snapchat to the MeUndies website and has also launched several hidden sales campaigns to determine how many users used a specific promotion code. He is now convinced that Snapchat is the most impactful channel for introducing users to the brand and then getting them to make purchases. "We're getting more bang for our buck per follower than any other social media network," he says....