Snapchat came on the social scene in 2011 and gained a reputation as a tool for teen sexting. But, over the past five years, Snapchat has outgrown its salacious past and matured into a valuable tool for brands looking to connect with younger audiences. With a reported 150 million people using the app each day, Snapchat is no longer something communicators can afford to ignore if they want to reach younger generations.
Brands on Snapchat
From daily stories to sponsored filters, Snapchat has multiple ways for brands of all shapes and sizes to get involved with its daily users. In addition to its dynamic and interactive filters that users can apply to photos, Snapchat enabled geofilters - location-based image overlays that can only been seen in a specific geographic area.
Community vs. On-Demand
There are two types of Snapchat geofilters: community and on-demand. Community geofilters are the earned media of the Snapchat world and perfect for cities, universities, parks, landmarks and other public locations. While it's free to submit a community geofilter, Snapchat does restrict what you can have in your design (e.g., no brand logos).
Alternatively, on-demand geofilters can be explicitly branded with corporate logos or trademarks, but they come at a price. The cost of an on-demand geofilter depends on a few factors including the size of the area in which it will appear and the length of time that it will be visible to users. On-demand geofilters are great for events.
Submission and (Hopefully) Success
After a community geofilter is designed and exported as a PNG file with a transparent background, it can be submitted along with an explanation of why the location is meaningful and the geographic area where the geofilter would be visible.
Snapchat has very high standards for community geofilter designs and reviews each submission individually. The intense vetting process can take a few weeks and not every geofilter gets approved. Once a geofilter design has been evaluated, Snapchat sends an email notification of the acceptance or rejection of your geofilter.
Experimenting with community geofilters has taught us a lot and we're excited to help our clients leverage Snapchat to target hard-to-reach younger audiences.
Stay tuned for tips about how to get your Snapchat community geofilters approved!