K atie c ouric

Content Production and Strategy for Snapchat
Snapchat content works well when it’s collaborative and features the
audience in some way. While growing various brands’ Snapchat accounts,
Choi discovered that one successful tactic is to do a weekly participatory
story where she gets her audience to respond to questions. For example,
she’d create a story around guessing the name of a song or something
similar. She’d post the song and the audience would submit their responses.
They’d send her either an answer or a selfie with an answer. This was very
popular and created high engagement.
Due to Snapchat’s collaborative nature, response rates are usually
higher than on most other platforms. Because of this, Choi recommends
using a call to action and getting people to send you their thoughts or input.
Again, people want to feel like they’re chatting directly with the influencer,
not like they are passively liking or commenting on a post.
Be Authentic
Chris Carmichael, one of the original creators and influencers on Snapchat
(the first to build a following of a hundred thousand people) and current
CEO of Bitsmash—an app that makes it super easy for anyone to make
creative vlogs using just their smartphones—shares his story of becoming
popular on this platform. When Snapchat was just starting to become
popular in 2014, he was on a trip in Iceland. The platform wasn’t really
popular in the States yet, but he noticed that in Iceland even grandparents
were using snaps as a communication tool. By observing this behavior, his
intuition told him that the platform was going to take off and he started
telling stories every day. On that trip alone, he built up ten thousand views
on his snaps. At the time, no one was even thinking of using the platform as
an influencer tool, so to have ten thousand views was a novel concept.

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Shortly after this success, he moved to New York and collaborated with
a bunch of Viners (from the Vine app) to try to help them grow on
Snapchat. Eventually, Carmichael built up around 150,000 views a snap and
was getting shout-outs from influencers like Jerome Jarre, King Bach, and
Vitaly. The conversion rates on those shoutouts were about 10 percent,
which is unheard of—usually you only convert around 1 to 2 percent of
viewers.
Brands started reaching out to him. Carmichael went from eating ramen
noodles to making $10,000 a story for brands like Disney, Universal,
Lionsgate, and Fox. He quickly learned that vertical videos (the kind
featured on Snapchat and Instagram Stories) were going to be the next
medium kids were addicted to. And it was obvious to him that brands had
no idea how to use the vertical video medium. A lot of brands were trying
to apply the traditional advertising ideology to a platform that just doesn’t
buy into it. When millennials see a traditional commercial, they’re instantly
turned off, and since most Snapchat users are between thirteen and thirty-
four years old, they immediately smell the inauthenticity. Brands came to
Snapchat trying to apply traditional methodologies to a platform that’s
super intimate, where you can’t lie. You can’t say things like, “Buy this
toothpaste ’cause it will make your life happier.” If you lie or try to sell
something, you lose your audience. You must be authentic and tell the truth.
Also, on vertical videos your facial expressions are very close up—you’re
right in your audience’s face, so if the person speaking is not genuinely in
love with the featured product, it’s obvious and can work against the brand.
Carmichael notes that a lot of brands also make the mistake of trying to
create high-end, polished content for Snapchat, which is not what kids like
—they don’t relate to that. They relate to messy drawings and mistakes.
Choi adds that people don’t think about their snaps in advance. They see
something, pull out the phone, document, and send; that’s the nature of the
platform.
Choi brings up Mike Khoury, who gets two hundred thousand views on
a single snap on Snapchat, which is a lot for someone who doesn’t have a
prominent YouTube channel or previous Vine following. He creates
comedic content where he rants about things right in the moment. He
constantly makes mistakes in his speech, but it works because it’s funny and

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authentic. That’s what people on this platform like; it’s what gets them to
share the Snapchat story.
Kids want to see a real human being, flaws and all. Be authentic, real,
and vulnerable with the audience.