Snapchat for Business: How to Nurture Your Audience

Part 7 of The Social Media Strategy Series

“Should I be on Snapchat?” It’s one of the most frequent questions I get from small business owners. There’s a lot of excitement about this new and unique platform—with good reason. But a lot of it is just hype, too. So how can you make a good decision for you and your business?

Like anything in business, you want to do it with a strategy behind it. Snapchat provides an opportunity for you to show a side of your business that’s more personal—that there are real people in your company, doing real things. The flavor of it is different than the other platforms, though. By its very nature, it’s not for hyper-produced content. It’s for stuff that is more real or raw.

If you’re interested to learn more about it, listen to the episode for what I think are the best business uses for this unique social platform. I get into:

• How Snapchat’s all-in-one philosophy makes it very different from other social platforms.
• Why you don’t need a large budget to create interesting content on Snapchat.
• How Snapchat creates urgency and scarcity like no other social platform.
• Snapchat’s new “Memories,” and how that will affect your content strategy.
• How to use Snapchat to give a behind-the-scenes look at your business.
• Using Snapchat to create narratives – and how to plan them out in advance.
• Third party apps to help with the audience-building limitations of Snapchat.
• Why I believe that Snapchat’s user interface is deliberately obtuse.
• Using Snapchat as your “test kitchen” for content.
• How to use Snapchat “indirectly” to show your creative side.

Listen here, or subscribe in iTunes.

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Show Notes

In the episode, I highlighted a few examples of people making good use of Snapchat for business:

• Mark Suster (@msuster) uses Snapchat as an instructional platform and does a great job establishing himself as an authority in his field. He’s collected his “Snapstorms” into a more permanent archive, which is a great idea for getting around the platform’s chief restriction.
• Erica Blair (@theericablair) uses the platform for a mix of inspiration and building the trust of her audience, and she’s great at being really bi-directional with her followers—which you know I love to see.
• Jay Acunzo (@jayacunzo) offers a great behind-the-scenes look at how his excellent podcast comes to life. His podcast is called Unthinkable, and you should definitely subscribe to that one too!

Follow them to see some great models of Snapchat in action. They are all really effective at it in different ways, which I describe in a lot more detail in the episode itself.

To see how I use Snapchat for business, find me at @mboezi, like on (almost) every platform out there!

And I though I couldn’t remember while I was recording the episode, I researched it a bit—and I think this is where I first heard the concept, “Snapchat is not a platform to grow your audience. It’s a platform to nurture your already-existing audience.”

I’m quoting from an article called, “Snapchat is NOT for Everyone — Don’t Believe the Hype…Here’s Why” by Dakota Shane Nunley. I wanted to make sure that I credited this properly.