The dos and don’ts for succeeding on Snapchat

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Although it has lost a proportion of its users over the last couple of years, Snapchat continues to form a vital aspect of social media campaigns. While the number of users has decreased over the last year, the platform is still popular among a large audience, making it a great tool for expanding your reach and sharing your content. Many of the leading platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been inspired by some of Snapchat’s features. For example, stories originated on Snapchat and have since become a major aspect of campaigns globally across social platforms. But many artists still struggle to utilise the platform effectively when sharing their content. We’ve taken a look at some of the dos and don’ts that all artists should follow when using Snapchat.

Snapchat has over 188 million active users, making the reach opportunities absolutely huge. The platform is primarily used by people between the ages of 18-24, which is also the ideal age bracket for you to target your music towards. This makes Snapchat the ideal tool for promoting your music and content to your audience. Having only officially been launched 7 years ago in 2011, the platform has made huge strides in becoming one of the world’s most popular social media services. This was largely due to its unique nature at the time, becoming the first platform to be founded upon temporary posts that disappeared instantly. After the introduction of stories, users could share posts that lasted for 24 hours, providing a better opportunity for musicians and brands to utilise the platform with promotional content.

Snapchat differs from other platforms as it doesn’t allow users to create a profile featuring their details. This means that you are only ever present on the platform when you are publishing content. This makes activities like creating stories and adding a sponsored geofilter even more important within your strategy. For this reason, it is important to always publish at least one story per day to make sure that you are always visible on the platform. The rest of the social media platforms allow fans to browse your content whenever they choose to, with Snapchat they can only ever see what you have published within 24 hours.

The positive aspect of Snapchat stories is that they create urgency for users to keep up to date. For example, it creates the fear of missing out. Fans don’t want to miss out on news from artists and festivals so they must check up on content at least once a day. This means that a fan will repeatedly keep coming back for more content and making sure not to miss out. There is no urgency for users to check their Twitter timeline, but checking Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook stories is something that must be done routinely.

While on other platforms you can over-share and publish too much content, on Snapchat, users must seek out your story, meaning that you cannot really ‘spam’. Even if you post 10 consecutive updates, users have the option to stop watching your story at any time, so the frequency of updates is not something that you need to worry about. If you want to update lots of times during the same day to share new music etc with your audience, there is no problem in doing so, and you are very unlikely to lose followers as a result. This gives you a much greater opportunity to connect with your audience as you can publish posts much more frequently.

On the other hand, when you have a big announcement to share, make sure that it is at the very beginning of your story. This is because, although there is no harm in posting plenty of updates, not everyone will watch your story until the end. Even if it means deleting the last couple of posts from the previous day, if you have an important announcement it is vital to start with a clean slate. For example, if you’re releasing an album today, you want your audience to see it instantly, so make sure that the announcement is the very first thing your audience will see when they watch your story.

Many struggle to provoke engagement on Snapchat because they simply share the same content from their Instagram story and reuse it for Snapchat. Publishing identical content on multiple social media platforms is never a good idea, as it means that your audience won’t feel the need to follow you on more than one outlet. Instead, offer people a more real, filter-free version of your life. Treat Snapchat as a platform where you can be more honest with how you’re feeling, how your day went and what your ideas are for the future. Make it the platform where your fans can connect with you in order to see a more real side of you as an artist.

Despite Snapchat’s decline, it is still an incredibly vital tool in building and sustaining a following. In order to really succeed on social media, it is important that you maintain a strong output on each of the main channels, including Snapchat. Use the fact that some artists are leaving the platform to your advantage, this way, you have much less competition in keeping the attention of your audience. Become an exciting person to follow on Snapchat by providing plenty of great content, and soon the subscriptions will be flooding in from fans in all corners of the globe.