Mike Delgado

The announcement that anyone can now upload photos and videos from your phone’s camera roll might annoy some (who prefer the organic feel of Snapchat) — but could be a huge benefit for brands who have strict rules around content and needing various types of approvals before posting.

Personally, I like the organic nature of Snapchat — and hope Snapchat Memories won’t be abused. I’d hate to see Snapchat become streams of enhanced images and videos (a la Instagram).

Snapchat Memories should not replace your brand’s in-the-moment snap strategy — only enhance it.

Here are 5 ways brands can leverage memories:

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Does your brand want to improve view counts and engagement on Snapchat?

The first step to building a thriving fan base on Snapchat is to focus on engaging with others. This means watching other people’s snaps — and snapping back with relevant comments, emojis and/or questions.

Brands need to be intentional about starting a conversation with their target audience in order to earn attention. And this will be more important as ever as the Snapchat algorithm begins to reduce brand visibility (similar to Facebook).

The mistake many brands make is they snap a story and leave (only to return to count views, screenshots, and reply to snaps). That strategy could work if you’re a huge brand with tons of adoring fans — but most brands don’t have that kind of fan base on Snapchat. Starting a community means initiating a conversation — and this is easy to do through private snaps. It just takes time.

Private snaps are the foundation for how Snapchat started — and it’s still the key way close friends communicate on this platform.

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One of the best ways for brands to tell better stories on Snapchat is to plan ahead with a storyboard.

Some benefits of storyboarding your snaps:

Storyboarding helps you prepare everything you’ll need in advance (e.g. batteries, tripods, lenses, stylus, props, external microphones, music)

Storyboarding is helpful for brands in highly-regulated industries because story and text can get approved by compliance and legal teams

A storyboard can help you communicate your snap story to your team and senior leaders before an event

Storyboarding saves you time because you know in advance what text, filters, lenses, or emojis you’ll use

Storyboarding can help you plan out potential stories to tell at events, which is helpful when you’re too busy (or feeling less creative)

Storyboarding can help employees who are not comfortable on Snapchat and need direction

Obviously, you don’t need to storyboard every snap story — but storyboarding can be very helpful for times when you want to tell a really good story.

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Many brands are struggling to figure out how to use Snapchat (and how to determine success).

Unlike other social channels, you don’t get “likes” or “shares” — so the only measure of engagement success is snapbacks (replies), screenshot rates (likes), views, story completion rates, and follower growth.

Here are 10 ways to drive more engagement on Snapchat:
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Snapchat is a killer channel for engagement and storytelling — and a great platform for businesses to build their brand, increase their reach, and build relationships.

Here are some financial brands doing creative work on Snapchat:

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Do ever wonder how you can keep viewer attention when live streaming?

Do you want to improve viewer involvement in your online videos?

As the host of a weekly video chat for nearly three years, I’m always striving to increase attention and audience engagement. Some video engagement factors I’ve noticed include: the topic of the chat, day/time of the chat, length of the chat, featured guests in the chat, and number of viewers interacting during the event (e.g. conversations in the Blab sidebar or Twitter conversation).

Right now, I’m digging into research into different types of video productions that are similar to live-streaming. Last week, we looked at factors that increased engagement during live webinars. This week, I’m examining ways professors can improve video engagement in their online courses — and how many of these factors apply to live streamers.

Researchers analyzed a data set of 6.9 million video watching sessions of online courses to find out what factors led to more engagement in online lectures. The video lectures were given by professors at MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley.

Engagement on video content was based on time spent watching the video — and sometimes a video was followed-up by a multiple-choice question designed to check a student’s understanding of the video content.

Here is what the research revealed:

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How do you develop live streaming content that will capture your audience’s attention?

How do you keep viewers engaged and/or entertained so they want to spend time with you?

After all, distractions abound.

Technology is a siren that constantly pulls our attention away.

How many apps provide you notifications? How many emails do you need to read? Do you have any snaps to see? What about Facebook or Instagram updates to check out? Any phone call messages or text messages to respond to?

Some studies suggest that we have attention spans of 8.25 seconds.

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As a social media community builder, listening is a key aspect to my work.

Listening helps me find my target audience online

Listening helps me understand the topics and trends that matter

Listening helps me find out the pain points of my community

Listening helps me discover what channels drive traffic & revenue

Listening helps me develop better content

Listening helps me engage better

The trouble with listening is that it takes time – and there isn’t always a clear financial ROI. You can spend all day analyzing social media data, but not achieved one of your social business goals (e.g. customer care, improve brand awareness, web traffic, leads, etc.).

After all, there is a ton of data to analyze.

Social media listening tools provide you with demographic data, social mentions by regions, data on competitors, data on influencers, data on best times to post, data on what type of content performs well (and where), sentiment data, etc. And then there is time-consuming unstructured data (e.g. video, audio) that is difficult to analyze – or live streaming data that can be a beast to tackle.

The trouble isn’t collecting the social media data, it’s analyzing the right data and making actionable decisions from it. 

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