Editor’s Note: As we are building our SkiftEDU service for marketers and SMBs in travel, we recently launched a new initiative: our new weekly series on digital marketing tips and tricks, SkiftEDU How-Tos. These How-Tos are a series of free in-depth weekly articles around various topics in digital marketing, such as this one below
Have you ever considered using Snapchat to promote your destination, hotel, restaurant or event? With 150 million daily active users, Snapchat now has more daily active users than Twitter. Over 10 billion videos are viewed each day - that’s as much as Facebook or YouTube, even though both have much bigger user bases - making Snapchat a hugely popular social media network. Particularly with young people, seeing impressive growth in users between 18 and 34 years old (41% of users in the United States). As a result, Snapchat represents a tremendous opportunity to market to Millennials.
While Snapchat is still mainly a “Millennial thing”, the number of older users is growing. In fact, eMarketer projects that 44% of Snapchat’s users will be aged 40 or older by 2020. And advertisers are taking notice!
The fun and instantaneous aspect of Snapchat makes it more of a game than a promotional tool. However, you’ll soon find out that when used properly, you can develop an enviable community of users that can become loyal to your brand.
1. Understanding and mastering Snapchat
The new ephemeral culture
Understanding Snapchat is not always easy, but once you test it out a few times, you’ll quickly notice that this social media network fosters instant and ephemeral content. Contrary to other social media networks and interactive applications that have risen in popularity over the past few years, Snapchat incites users to create content and message, and share ephemeral images. In fact, content shared on private Snapchats self-destruct after it has been viewed. Public messages disappear after 24 hours. Users’ curiosity and fear of missing out (FOMO) is what drives them to Snapchat each an
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