Snapchat for brands: who is there in 2014 and what works

Snapchat launched in 2011 as a disappearing-photo app and spent two years being misunderstood. The product that matters to marketers arrived in October 2013: Stories, a sequence of snaps that lasts 24 hours and can be viewed more than once by everyone who has added you. Stories turned a private messaging app into a broadcast channel with a built-in expiry date.

This year the company kept building. "Our Story" launched in June, stitching together public snaps from a single event, starting with the Electric Daisy Carnival and continuing through college football games. Chat and live video arrived in May. In October the first paid placement ran: a 20-second trailer for the horror film Ouija, appearing in Recent Updates and skippable at any time. The company's own blog called it "an ad" with unusual candor and said it would not be targeted or creepy. In the same month, a third-party app's security breach exposed roughly 200,000 saved snaps, a reminder that the platform's privacy story is fragile.

The audience is young. Comscore and other measurement firms place Snapchat's heaviest use among 13 to 24 year olds, with reach among that group in the US rivaling Instagram's. Engagement is high because the app is a messaging tool first: people open it many times a day to talk to friends, and a brand story sits in that same list.

The early adopters cluster into a few groups and each has learned something different.

Fast food and snacks. Taco Bell was first in, using Snapchat in 2013 to announce the Beefy Crunch Burrito's return and following with story-based campaigns since. McDonald's joined in September with a story featuring LeBron James and behind-the-scenes content. These brands win because their audience and their tone already fit: casual, playful, frequent.

Retail and fashion. Rebecca Minkoff showed a collection on Snapchat before it walked the runway at New York Fashion Week in September. Karmaloop and 16 Handles (the frozen yogurt chain that ran one of the first snap-for-a-coupon promotions) use it for discounts delivered as snaps.

Media and entertainment. MTV, Mashable and the NBA use stories for behind-the-scenes and event coverage. Sports teams including the New Orleans Saints and several college programs post from inside the locker room and the bus.

Delivery and services. GrubHub ran a week-long scavenger hunt in April, sending daily challenges and rewarding replies with promo codes. It is the most-cited example of two-way engagement and the model for most "snap us back" promotions since.

Consumer brands testing. Audi, Acura and HBO have all run stories, often around a single event like the Super Bowl or a show premiere, rather than committing to an ongoing presence.

The common thread is that none of them treat it as a distribution channel for existing content. Everything is shot for the app, vertically, by hand, often on the day.

Four patterns show up repeatedly among the accounts that keep an audience.

Behind the scenes, unpolished. The format rewards access over production value. A product designer sketching, a kitchen at 6 a.m., the team setting up for an event. If it looks like a TV ad it feels wrong in the feed.

Stories with a beginning, middle and end. The best accounts plan a day's story as a short narrative of five to fifteen snaps. Viewers who tap through to the end are far more valuable than first-snap views, and a story that goes somewhere earns completion.

Reciprocity. Ask for a snap back and reply to the ones you get. GrubHub's scavenger hunt and 16 Handles' coupon campaign worked because the brand responded. This is where the labor goes.

Exclusivity with a clock. Reveal something here first, or offer a code that dies with the story. The 24-hour expiry is a built-in reason to open the app, and brands that waste it on content that lives elsewhere lose the advantage.

What does not work: reposting Instagram photos, long text overlays, sporadic posting with months of silence, and putting the account in the hands of someone who does not use the app personally.

If the audience fits, start small and specific.

1. Register the username now, even if you do not post for months. Squatting is already a problem.
2. Assign one owner who is a daily Snapchat user. This cannot be done by committee or by an agency intern who has never sent a snap.
3. Promote the account everywhere else. There is no discovery inside the app; people find you by username or by scanning your ghost code. Put the code on Instagram, Twitter, packaging, receipts and the footer of emails. Expect slow growth: a few hundred followers in the first month is normal for a regional brand, a few thousand for a national one.
4. Post two to four stories a week with a plan for each, not daily filler.
5. Run one reply-driven promotion per month and track redemptions with a code only used in snaps.
6. Review after 90 days against the measurement below, then decide whether to continue, expand or park it.

Time cost is the real budget line. Expect three to six hours a week for content and replies at a modest cadence, and significantly more during a campaign. Out-of-pocket cost is close to zero.

The app shows two numbers per snap in a story: views and screenshots. Record them by hand in a spreadsheet within 24 hours, because they disappear with the story.

Completion rates above 70 percent are good for a brand story. Screenshot rates are usually under five percent unless there is a code or an offer. Benchmarks are thin because the platform is new; your own trend over three months matters more.

Be honest about fit. If your buyers are 35-plus, the audience is not there in volume yet. If your brand voice is formal, the format will fight you. If your team cannot sustain the reply workload, a dead account is worse than none. And with ads only just beginning, there is no paid lever to accelerate a slow start. Many businesses should register the name, watch what competitors do, and revisit when a self-serve ad product or discovery features arrive.

New platforms get the same four-stage treatment as established ones, scaled to the uncertainty. In discover we check whether the audience is actually there for the brand, pull what competitors and adjacent categories are doing, and decide what the account is for: launch news, customer service, promotions or brand personality. In plan we write a 90-day content calendar with two or three story formats, a promotion mechanic and the measurement sheet. In build our creative and social teams produce the first stories, train the in-house owner, design the ghost code placements across web, email, packaging and other social channels, and set up the tracking codes. In improve we review completion and reply data monthly and either expand, change format or recommend parking the channel.

Because brand, growth, web and technology sit together, the Snapchat work does not float alone: the promo codes connect to the e-commerce system, the ghost code goes on the site and in email templates, and the content feeds back into the broader campaign.

A representative engagement was a consumer brand with a young audience that wanted a presence on emerging platforms without diluting the main campaign. The work began with a short audit of where that audience actually spent time, which confirmed Snapchat alongside Instagram and Vine. We built a content system that let one in-house owner produce behind-the-scenes stories and monthly reply-driven promotions, with a measurement sheet and unique codes connected to the store. Within a quarter the channel had a small but highly engaged following and story completion rates well above the brand's video view-through elsewhere, which was enough to justify continuing. You can read more about that kind of work in our content case study.