Many Reasons Every Business Should be on Snapchat

Snapchat is the newest social tool that lets you share photos and video, or “snaps,” with the bonus of adding drawings or captions to whatever you record. Here’s the catch: Snaps disappear after a few seconds, marketing using social media and the sender gets to choose how many seconds messages will be visible before they self-destruct. The concept basically blends photo and video texting with the age-old tradition of sending notes with disappearing ink. What’s the appeal? Less pressure to be perfect than on other platforms such as Facebook, where content is more permanent. It’s a simple way to share simple things, and in a world where every social media lover has to become their own personal public relations guru, Snapchat offers a stress-free way to say whatever. Here are five reasons your business should utilize the app. Do you ever feel like Facebook is dominated by baby photos, potty-training updates and moms creeping on their children’s pages?Well, you’re not crazy.Twenty-seven million U.S. mothers are on Facebook, with 79 percent of them visiting just about every day, reports Facebook. Moms are also the most engaged and connected people on Facebook, posting 1.4 times more comments and 1.3 times more updates than other U.S. women over 18. Vice President Joe Biden, who currently follows only the White House and First Lady Michelle Obama, currently has over 12,000 followers after joining the social-networking site earlier today. So far, the VP has posted two photos. The first is an almost perfect Instagram shot: Joe is blurred out in the distance, thoughtfully reading, with his Ray-Ban aviators taking center stage. The second is a snap of him exiting a helicopter in Pennsylvania.By now you’ve probably heard about US Airways’ gross, social media marketing applications jaw-dropping (and, ahem, “toy” airplane-centric) porno pic tweet gasped about across the globe yesterday. If you haven’t, it’s scrubbed clean from Twitter now, thank goodness.Thanks to the unforgiving foreverness of the interwebs, you can Google screenshots taken of the offensive image, but we don’t suggest you do, especially if you’re at work and you value your job.

People use it, and they’re going to keep using it

Snapchat first caught on among high schoolers, but now college students have checked in to the craze. The app, designed by Stanford students Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy as part of a class project, launched in Apple’s app store in September 2011. By October 2012, search and social media marketing the company tallied its billionth snap. The company is estimated to have more than 30 million users as of December 2013, although they’re coy about sharing the actual number.Scoffers might wrinkle their noses and shrug Snapchat off as another passing phase. But skeptics were momentarily silenced in November 2013 when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offered the infant startup $3 billion in cash and was promptly turned down. Whether you’re keyed in to Snapchat or not, Facebook knows Snapchat’s hot, but Snapchat knows it’s even hotter.If you thought having your own dedicated social media account rep was only for the “big guys,” think again. $99Social was created by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. It understands you need the coverage and the help to get your successful social media campaign off the ground and on a budget (as you may have guessed, at $99 a month). You fill out a pre-questionnaire so your account rep can get to know your business and needs, then they help create a meaningful social media presence for you. That plan includes daily postings, responses to social media comments and even spam removal on your branded Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts. There’s no contract, no hidden fees and no price increases. It’s straight up $99 and provides a tremendous value for the cost. Yeah, it was that bad. A public relations train wreck easily a thousand times worse than Target’s recent “thigh gap” shame spiral. When we heard about the beyond NSFW tweet and then, yes, social media marketing agencies rushed over to US Airways’ Twitter feed and got an eyeful of it (then slammed our Macbook shut, lest anyone should see) we thought it was all a sick joke. A disgruntled employee must have hijacked US Airways’ Twitter account, right? Maybe hackers had more than a little fun with it.Not so. Turns out the worst branded tweet of all time was an inside job, one that we hope wasn’t intended, an epic accident.

You’ve already built the audience on other social platforms

Snapchat is part social hybrid and part revolutionary, but adding it as a marketing platform doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel. After all, what about all those Facebook fans and Twitter followers you worked so hard to collect? importance of social media marketing Does Snapchat mean those metrics have an expiration date? Not at all. Existing social platforms can remain healthy even as they drive fans and followers to explore a new sharing tool with you.Incentivize your audience to join you on Snapchat and you’ll not only gain an instant audience on an emerging platform, you’ll find a whole new way to interest them. Offer mobile coupons, the chance to take a sneak peek behind the scenes, and the promise to deliver hot brand news to Snapchatters before anyone else, and fans will follow. It all started when a customer took to Twitter yesterday to complain to US Airways about, but of course, flight delays. US Airways responded with the standard apologies. After all, the airline doesn’t like flight delays either, it said. The customer responded by expressing yet more dissatisfaction and frustration. Then US Airways inexplicably fired back with the shocking image, which stayed live online for around an hour. Yeah, that long. Long enough for kids to bump into it.How the seriously nasty image was irresponsibly left to litter Twitter for so long has us questioning the entire corporate communications team at US Airways. Then there was the outpouring of rude, downright tasteless tweets essentially saying that the lewd image was proof that the missing Malaysia Airlines plane had been found after all. Wrong on so many levels and a massive PR disaster on top of an already massive PR disaster . learn social media marketing There was also no shortage of hilarious reaction tweets, 38 “priceless” gems of which were lovingly listed by Mashable (warning, some of them aren’t safe for work either). Imagine how much of a blast Saturday Night Live is going to have with this giant fail over the weekend. And an hour is also about how long it took for US Airways to issue an apology tweet.