Why we’re not investing in Snapchat (right now)

6 months ago we started experimenting with Snapchat as a marketing tool…

And we’ve now decided we’re not going to continue investing in it.

Why?

Well, we took a number of factors into consideration, and I discuss them all in our latest video.

Transcription

So are you thinking about investing in Snapchat?

Well, that’s what we did about 6 months ago and you may have seen it in the article that we posted on our 100 days of Snapchat, which talks about our history of experimenting on Snapchat and the behind-the-scenes video that actually shows you some of the conversations that happen behind closed doors here.

At the end of our experiment we decided that we’re not going to invest in Snapchat because it doesn’t have a discovery channel.

So, what’s a discovery channel?

It basically allows you to increase the people who follow you within the channel itself.

With Snapchat, you need to market it across other channels to get people to come to Snapchat to follow you.

So we tried that. We tried email, we tried social media, we tried across Instagram and Facebook, we did everything over and over again trying to find the way to scale up the people who follow us.

And it did increase. It just – it didn’t increase at the level that we were excited about.

Compare that to Instagram Stories.

It’s a platform that’s already there. That already has everybody on there and it has pretty much the same features as Snapchat does.

Instead of spending all of our effort on Snapchat, we spent it on Instagram Stories and we already have an audience and it’s easy to increase the followers and there’s an advertising platform and so on.

So, for us the decision between Snapchat, say for example, and Instagram Stories, it became an easy one because on Instagram we could increase the people who follow us and you need people to follow you to see your content.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

So, if you’re considering investing in Snapchat just ask yourself, ‘Have you got a way to increase the people who follow you?’

If you do, you should keep investing in it. If you don’t, then I would instead be focusing on Instagram Stories, which has all the features that I’ve just mentioned.

I hope this was helpful.

Talk soon.

About the show

Webprofits is a full service online marketing agency with over 80 data-driven specialists. Built on a culture of innovative, strategic and intuitive thinking, Webprofits focuses on achieving successful, performance-based results online.

Webprofits TV is our way of helping business owners, C-level executives and marketing professionals grow a business using online marketing, with a particular focus on social media, online advertising, content marketing and conversion rate optimisation. You can use this information to implement the strategies yourself or to help you know what to expect from anyone you hire to do it for you.

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Alex Cleanthous

Director + Co-Founder at Webprofits

Alex Cleanthous is an entrepreneur, writer, technologist, and marketing leader. He is Co-Founder of Webprofits, Australia’s largest private digital consultancy. With more than 20 years experience in the digital space, Alex stays at the forefront of digital innovation, strategy, and execution identifying new markets, platforms, and tools to keep pace with the exponential expansion of technology.