The power of Snapchat

Snapchat is one of the most powerful ways of communicating today, short and sweet bursts of messages between you and a friend on your phone that disappear before you have a chance to react, it’s the fast-paced engagement and the exchange of information keeping us hooked. From Snapchat’s origin in quick fire picture exchange, its has significantly evolved offering text exchange between users, highly interactive and engaging video filters, story telling video diaries, worldwide event coverage and most prominent – Brand advertising. Just as the evolution of social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Snapchat has quickly overruled as the leader in brand awareness. The user interaction analytics secure Snapchat as the most used social media platform and with this information comes a responsibility as a business to jump on board and get your brand out there.

There are many tiers of Snapchat advertising that can be easily achieved at any business level and what makes it better is Snapchat advertising is surprisingly affordable. For instance, our first use of Snapchat advertising at Kaizen brand Evolution was a simple Geofilter (interactive branding watermark over the top of the live feed camera) at Culture Night Belfast 2016. For this, we simply created a mobile sized, branded template, which could be used on the night of the event. The brilliant thing about Snapchat is that you set your location; timings and radius reach to pinpoint exactly where you want the Snapchat Geofilter to appear. What an unbelievably personal, in the moment and engaging form of advertising. It was so exciting seeing people interact and use our own Kaizen Brand Evolution filter on the night, and it appeared on your selections just after the main Snapchat filters. Following the interactions and success of the evening at Belfast Culture Night 2016, we reviewed the analytics of our simple Geofilter design and the stats were staggering. Let me put this into perspective, we set the location radius to an area of Belfast about the size of a football stadium, we had it running on Snapchat for 6hours and we told maybe 100 people who came to our stall at Belfast Culture Night 2016 about its existence and how we were testing the new medium. Our analytics report on user engagement was staggering: We had 17.3k views of our filter and 346 uses.

This only sets to prove my point on how powerful Snapchat is as a brand awareness tool. Following our first use of Snapchat we have been providing the branding service for our clients. Most notably for Boojum and their Halloween campaign. The premise of the campaign was to draw customers to each of the 3 locations of Boojum restaurants in Belfast City Centre. We created and designed 3 separate Snapchat filter designs for Boojum to use across their Great Victoria Street, Chichester Street and Botanic Avenue sites. Each design is different and alongside a Facebook and Twitter post we encourage customers to attend each Boojum location to essentially ‘catch ‘em all’ (not to paraphrase the Pokemon Go craze, but you get my point). There are two key points to this campaign, brand awareness, and brand engagement. Alongside the fantastic Halloween themed design the plans to involve their customers and locations will certainly prove successful. This forward thinking brand medium provides a new platform for brands to showcase their business in a new way, and the results speak for themselves. If we can achieve 17.3k views with hardly any marketing or build up, imagine the possibilities for your brand.

We now specialise in the design, creation, and customisation of Snapchat Geofilters and advertising. If you believe in your business and would like some design intervention online, engaging and interacting with more potential customers that ever, get in touch and we’ll be happy to set up a meeting.

Get LinkedIn Branded

On Friday 16 September Culture Night Belfast 2016, we are offering to “Get Him/Her Branded”.

Kaizen Brand Evolution raises the profiles of clients we work with and so we are setting up a mini version of our process to enhance people’s online profiles on the night. Whether it’s to document the night with friends, for dating, or to have a killer LinkedIn image for that new job. On the night we’ll be offering personal taglines, and to have your picture taken in Cotton Court Galleries in the heart of the Cathedral Quarter. So come, down, get involved, Get Him/Her Branded!

Image and brand personality has never been so pivotal for businesses in the public domain on social media. Before the event we thought we would go through a few top tips for branding your companies social media accounts.

LinkedIn:

Professional photos are a must for LinkedIn. But try to look a little different. Everyone in the company should have a LinkedIn profile that links through to your company’s page. It’s your professional portfolio and shows off the individual and how you all combine to make the company a powerhouse.

All the rules of perfecting a CV apply here, and tailor it to your business you’re in or after. Follow and interact with people and groups, show off your authority and skill. Constantly learn and post the certificates regularly. Lynda, Google and Hootsuite to name a few, all have links that automatically share your recent learning’s or accolades.

Keep up to date on our event on our Facebook event page: bit.ly/GHBranded