Phone: 
How 13 Brands Are Leveraging Snapchat Discover
By [email protected] (Pamela Bump)
Since Snapchat launched in 2011, brands have been experimenting with new ways to reach the platform’s Gen-Z and millennial audiences.
However, marketing on Snapchat hasn’t always been easy.
Between 2015 and 2017, brands like NASA, Warby Parker, and Sour Patch Kids started their Snapchat strategies by creating individual accounts. Based on the fact that none of these accounts are still posting, it seems that they quickly found that Snapchat’s platform did not do them any favors.
For example, since branded individual accounts are essentially the same as personal accounts, there’s essentially no difference between businesses and people on the platform. When following a business on Snapchat, it’s hard to tell if you’re following the actual company or just another account posing as such.
Aside from the account confusion, Snapchat’s platform also makes it difficult for users to search, find, or discover new brands. For example, users still need to search for a brand’s exact username or scan a Snapcode to find the company. This means that brands that market themselves on Snapchat accounts would need to do promotion on social media or other areas outside of the Snapchat platform to let people know that they’re actively posting there.
While many brands experimented with Snapchat Stories on their accounts, they still couldn’t link to their own websites or products. This might have also caused some friction as brands might’ve determined that they didn’t want to create content that wasn’t going to result in web traffic or an immediate ROI.
Because of these friction points, many brands have pivoted to other platforms, like Instagram Stories. Many marketers have also said that Instagram content receives much more engagement than Snapchat content.
Today, if you search brand names on Snapchat, you might find inactive old accounts. When you add one of these accounts as a friend, you’ll most likely see that they don’t publish anything there anymore. Many of them also don’t even have an emoji image or profile picture associated with their accounts anymore.
Here’s an example. A few years ago, I followed Warby Parker via a Snapcode they shared on social. Not only is the brand’s image gone, but it also hasn’t posted a story or any content from this account in a while:
With the failure of branded individual accounts, things improved for big brands with the 2015 launch of Snapchat Discover.
What Is Snapchat Discover?
If you’re less familiar with Snapchat, Discover is a page of the app that shows Story-styled content from publishers, brands, and major influencers who partner with the tech company. Below is a screenshot of what Discover looks like today. You can read more about this feature here.
In the early years of Discover, the format looked very different from the screenshot above. In fact, there were only a few Snapchat publishing partners that could have Stories on this section …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
