Influencer Orchestration Network

Brands and Creators Can Now Promote Snapchat Content Directly

Snapchat is finally allowing direct links to individual content pieces, providing more insight and opportunities for brands to market on the texting/social mashup of choice for Gen Z.

The walled garden of Snapchat continues to gain targeted cracks. According to Digiday, Snapchat announced plans to allow for direct links to specific content pages from Facebook, Twitter and other online destinations.

This is a seismic shift for Snapchat, whose unique user interface has made it challenging for audiences to find content from even the 16 companies like ESPN, Cosmopolitan and Buzzfeed that are part of their Discover page. This new option to link directly to a specific content page (instead of sending viewers only to the publisher home page) will allow publishers to more easily direct their audience to new content on Snapchat. This feature will also allow better tracking of how many eyeballs reach specific content, which has previously been a limitation that caused some brands to pause when considering the platform for part of their marketing campaigns.

The challenges publishers, brands and individual creators alike faced in getting audiences to their presence on Snapchat even had them using tactics like adding Snapcodes in place of their Twitter and Facebook avatars to tap into larger audiences who interact with them on those social networks. While brands have been getting creative and bringing influencer marketing elements to Snapchat campaigns, this new deep link functionality should help them direct audiences to their efforts.

Even without this amplification tool, Snapchat has been a huge source of views for publishers that are part of the Discover page. Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti recently told Re/code that 21 percent of Buzzfeed’s 5 billion monthly content views come from its presence on Snapchat. Yet these direct links will help and newly-added Discover publisher Vox wasted no time in using the functionality to promote content it produced for World Aids Day the day after the deep link launch. Mashable followed quickly with a promotion for #GivingTuesday.

 

This kind of cross-social sharing isn’t new, of course. Articles and YouTube videos are amplified on shorter-form social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn by brands, creators and influencers all the time. The new element is Snapchat’s closed system. As a purely mobile platform, there is no desktop experience for someone clicking one of these new Snapchat links. Instead, a Snapcode usable on a mobile phone is displayed. Plus, new users will need to download the app to get to the content they clicked.

Will casual readers just looking for content go through these hoops to get to the exclusive content? Only time will tell but Snapchat already has amazingly deep engagement from its users. Despite an audience of about 100 million daily users, they have 6 billion daily views – a number that rivals Facebook’s 8 million daily views from 10 times the number of active users.