Snapchat for Businesses in New Orleans

Snapchat is one of the newest social media platforms to sweep mobile phones across the world. The mobile application gained popularity for its ability to send pictures and videos that disappear instantly after being viewed. Since then, Snapchat integrated drawing capabilities, facial recognition filters, and even location filters to it’s app. Recently, Snapchat released a new function enabling individuals and businesses to create and purchase sponsored geofilters (fully customizable graphics that are available for use in photos and videos in a specific geographical area chosen by the creator). When considering Snapchat for businesses in New Orleans, it is important to understand the best practices for using the app, implementing geofilters, and how to use the analytical data Snapchat provides.

Creating Your Business’ Snapchat Account

Creating an account on Snapchat is simple and only requires an email, username, and password. Businesses should choose a username that resembles the business’ name as closely as possible to make it easy for other users to find and follow the account.

Using Snapchat

Businesses can share photos and videos with their followers through two ways:

• SnapStories – The Snapstory function involves taking a photo or video and making it available to all of your followers. Multiple photos or segments of video can be added to the Snapstory to make a long-running stream of content that engages viewers. SnapStories are especially useful for event coverage, openings, and demonstrations. This will likely be the most useful way for businesses to share content on Snapchat.
• Direct Snaps – Direct Snaps allow businesses to directly send pictures or videos to an individual or selected followers. This is particularly helpful for businesses that want to send targeted content or reach out to influencers, journalists, and other high-profile individuals.

Snapchat for Businesses in New Orleans

Geofilters are one of Snapchat’s newest additions and they are quite useful for businesses, especially those that receive a lot of foot traffic (restaurants, bars, hotels, retailers). The ability to create, customize, and set a geofilter to a particular area makes it a great tool for businesses to advertise their products or services using customer-generated content.

How It Works

If an individual is within the geofilter’s area and they take a photo or video on Snapchat they have the option to use the geofilter as a graphic within the image or video. Once the geofilter is selected, the customer will add the content to their Snapstory or share it with select followers. Geofilters are a great way to get customers to advertise for your business rather than solely relying on traditional methods. Click here for more information on how to use Snapchat!

Snapchat Geofilter Cost

Geofilters can be created for hourly periods or on an annual basis. Annual geofilters are much less expensive in the long run, going for as little as $440 per year. Hourly geofilters have a minimum price of $5 depending on the area they cover, meaning you will be paying nearly $2000 if you choose to schedule your geofilter on a hourly/daily basis for a year. However, not every business needs a geofilter running every day for a year, so businesses should consider the amount of daily foot traffic they receive before deciding if an annual geofilter is worth the price.

Snapchat Geofilter Best Practices

For the best geofilter engagement and results, create a high quality graphic that is visually appealing without being too obstructive. Display the business’ name, and include another piece of information like the business’ address, social media handles, or website address. Considering our city’s proclivity for festivals, Snapchat has huge potential for businesses in New Orleans during large events, festivals, and celebrations.

Reading your Snapchat Data

So, your business has created a Snapchat account and geofilter. What’s next? Analyzing the impressions, conversions, and views of a geofilter provides informative data on how much the geofilter is being used by your customers and how many non-customers are viewing the geofilter. While Snapchat has yet to figure out a way to determine how much of your business is directly influenced by geofilter advertising, there are ways to determine if your Snapchat filter is reaching a favorable number of people. Here are 3 metrics in Snapchat’s analytic toolkit that provide data relevant to your business:

1. Impressions – the number of people who saw the geofilter when within the mapped area.
2. Conversions – the number of people who applied the geofilter within the mapped area.
3. Views – the number of people who received and viewed videos and images that include the geofilter.

To make better sense of this data, it helps to have knowledge of how much foot traffic your business received during the time your geofilter ran. Comparing the number of people who visited your business with the number of impressions shows the percent of people who are using Snapchat and came across your geofilter. The conversion rate can be found when you divide the numbers of impressions by the number of conversions. While Snapchat has not released application-wide averages on conversion rates, the higher the conversion rate the better. A high conversion rate provides evidence that people are engaging with the geofilter when they see it, meaning they likely hold a favorable view of your business since they’re intentionally sharing the geofilter in their images and videos. The number of views your Snapchat receives is a great way to see the amount of reach the geofilter is obtaining. Often, one conversion will lead to many views. Try and figure out ways to encourage your customers to use the geofilter, leading to increased views, and higher foot traffic.

Other Good Practices for Snapchat

Businesses can benefit from displaying their Snapchat usernames in their stores, on social media, and on their websites to encourage people to follow them. Snapchat is not like Instagram or Twitter, where individuals are often exposed to the content of profiles they do not follow through retweets, reposts, mentions, etc. Instead, Snapchat users only receive content from those they follow so it is important to share your business’ username with customers and potential customers.

If you need assistance with creating a Snapchat Geofilter, or just have questions about using Snapchat for your business do not hesitate to give us a call at 504-324-0073 or send us an email. We are always happy to help out local businesses in their endeavors to market themselves and grow their businesses!