K atie c ouric

Leverage Collaborations
Carmichael says that to forge relationships, you have to climb the ladder.
Meet people at the bottom, get close to them, and get shoutouts. Create
something unique that no one else does, and if people think you’re going to
grow they’ll collaborate with you. You have to approach the low-hanging
fruit (people with fewer followers) and hope that someone will want to
make a story with you.
When Choi was growing one brand’s account, she got most of the
followers from paid influencer shout-outs. But on Snapchat you have to do
them in a specific way. You don’t have the influencer say, “Hey, there’s this
really cool channel. It does this and this, go follow it.” Instead, you make it
appear like you’re already friends with the large influencer. She asked the
influencer to say, “Hey guys, by the way, go say hi to my friend Christy.”
After this initiative, thousands of kids started following her. Kids think,
“I don’t know who Christy is, but she’s friends with this person I like and
she told me to say hi to her so I’m gonna do it because it’s kinda funny.”
This helped Choi build a massive following because on Snapchat you have
to add the person to be able to send them a message. Then on the days she
leveraged the influencer’s following, she would create an engaging story
that prompted people to stick around. She’d use the tactic of featuring fans
on the channel saying things like, “Hey, if you’re watching my stories
you’re going to get featured in front of thousands of people.” This incentive
tends to be successful.

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People Are Leaving Snapchat
From a marketing perspective, Choi sees good conversions on Snapchat. If
she has the same influencer do the exact same promotion on Snapchat
versus Instagram Stories, she actually sees better conversions on Snapchat.
The challenge now, however, is that more and more influencers are leaving
the platform.
A lot of people are switching to Instagram Stories because they’re not
growing on Snapchat. They don’t actually know how many followers they
have and the number of views they receive tends to go down on certain
days, which is discouraging. Choi feels that as there’s a certain vanity in
being an influencer, not knowing how many followers you actually have or
seeing your number of views drop can be a problem.
A lot of Snapchat original creators are trying to break into other
platforms. Many of them have also gone to musical.ly now, because if you
get featured there, you build a following. Most people using social media
are trying to grow and it’s really hard to do that on Snapchat.
As far as brands are concerned, Choi notices that recently fewer of them
are posting on a regular basis. They seem uninterested, either because their
platforms are not growing or because they see Snapchat fading away.
Carmichael adds that it’s a lot of work and money for brands to hire
people who are good at Snapchat. And if someone is good, they’ll often go
and start their own platform—they have no reason to create solely for one
brand. So brands usually end up using their office’s social media managers
to post content, which generally ends up being uninteresting or static.
Further, it’s hard for brands to measure if their activity is doing anything for
them. So a lot of brands, like influencers, end up focusing on Instagram
Stories and leaving Snapchat.
Carmichael thinks that the main reason why everyone is leaving
Snapchat is because right from the get-go the platform made the decision
not to work with influencers—in fact, they shunned them. They made it
very clear that they wouldn’t help them. Vine also made the exact same
mistake for years. They lost a lot of people to Facebook and Instagram and
then tried to get them back, but it was too late, just as it may be too late for
Snapchat.

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When Instagram copied Snapchat, all the influencers thought, “OK,
why would I promote both my Instagram and my Snapchat when I can just
promote my Instagram and get both the stories and the image feed?”
Instantly, a lot of influencers had way more views on their Instagram
Stories because it actually allows you to grow. You can use hashtags to
make your story searchable. If you happen to be the top post in a category,
you get a lot of views and people can discover your profile and follow you.
With Snapchat, on the other hand, there’s literally no way to do that; even if
you end up on a public story, people can’t reach you or find out who you
are or add you.