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While I am not totally sold on the long term survival of Snapchat as Instagram continues to eat away at it's rival, Ad revenue continues to look strong for the mobile app. Marketing your brand on Snapchat takes some creativity. It can be confusing, especially when you're starting out. Something to keep in mind is that a typical marketing funnel is broken down into three main stages: 1. Awareness. Prospects learn about your business and what you have to offer. 2. Interest. Prospects from the first phase take the first step toward becoming a customer by signing up for a webinar or company emails. 3. Evaluation. Prospects from phase two take the final jump to buy from you, often as the result of a sales call or integrating email. Snapchat is strongest during the second stage, when you're engaging your prospects and trying to create interest. In fact, research shows that Snapchat gets nearly a 4x higher engagement rate compared to similar platforms like Instagram but this is slowly changing as Instagram migrates many of Snapchat's features. Through Snapchat, you can deliver valuable content to your audience to let them see a different side of your business -- one that might not be as visible through another channel. Here are three ways marketers can use Snapchat to grow their businesses: 1. Offer promo codes. Brands have had success using promo codes on Snapchat because of how high the engagement rate is. 2. Launch products. You can also use Snapchat to launch new products. One of the unique benefits of Snapchat is that it gives you permission to create low-budget, informal videos. Letting them see you “behind the scenes,” where you might be unpolished, will help build a deeper relationship over the long term. 3. Leverage influencer marketing. By leveraging influencers, you can capture a much larger audience because your content will be viewed by both your followers and the followers of that influencer. It’s one of the quickest ways to build a massive audience of your own. Another way to use influencer marketing is by asking an influencer to do a takeover of your account. This basically means that they run your Snapchat account for a certain period of time, and post snaps on behalf of you. Conclusion Snapchat is still an up-and-coming platform. If it continues to hold on as a popular app then marketers will have something. Right now it is an app that has yet to become overcrowded. And, because of that, engagement levels are still significantly higher than many other platforms. Marketers who jump on it now will see significantly better engagement than those who get on board months -- or years later. Roy Garton FDMC Social & Digital Media LLC
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 Although I don’t have a ton of friends or contacts on WhatsApp, I continue to use this app and have been now for several years. I like it and now advertisers are starting to see the benefits of WhatsApp. The traffic is less crowded and there is a lot of potential here at lower advertising costs. Right now, brands are finding that a WhatsApp strategy makes sense for the always-time-strapped consumer. Instead of asking them to seek out the brand’s mobile app for a personalized experience, brands will come to them to talk where they already are. And since only 20 million of WhatsApp’s 1 billion users are projected to be based in the U.S. in 2017, according to Statista, the app serves as a door to an international audience. On WhatsApp, customers can select items they want to be delivered by scrolling through the latest updated stock. A Reliance Brand representative said in 2015 that conversion rate was as high as 80 percent, and that “cash-rich-time-poor” customers appreciated the convenience of the direct conversation. It helps that that conversation doesn’t cost the brands a lot, either. “One of the most appealing things about WhatsApp is its success rate. 98 percent of WhatsApp messages are opened and read. “Second, it’s cheap. Cheaper than any customer service or advertising on any traditional media, with the bonus of the automatic opt-in, since the customers gave you their telephone numbers.” Over the holidays, high-end lingerie brand Agent Provocateur set out on WhatsApp with a goal to help couples buy items. The customer service strategy was aimed at the “time-poor” customer, a brand spokesperson told Digiday, and also the retailer’s VIPs, who are becoming increasingly important in a competitive retail market. WhatsApp’s current advantage: It’s less crowded by other brands than the Facebooks and Snapchats of the world. “The challenge brands have is finding an uncluttered environment where they can talk to customers,” said David Cooperstein, an advisor to the programmatic platform Pebblepost. “They know people are spending time on WhatsApp, and they’re looking for ways to get visibility.” Outside of WhatsApp, brands have tested conversational-driven customer service and marketing on apps like WeChat and Facebook Messenger, as customers are becoming more open to the idea of chatting with a brand. So far, WhatsApp’s full potential is still yet to be tapped. Roy Garton FDMC Social & Digital Media LLC www.floridadudemarketeingconcepts.com Snapchat, that crazy little app that just a few short years ago nobody but teens paid any attention to has reinvented itself and is now one of the hottest apps going. Even huge Fortune 500 companies are now on board salivating for advertising and branding space. Why? Because the platform has done a total 180 and is now loaded with cool features and it is just not for kids anymore wanting to post selfies that disappear in 10 seconds (although that feature is still there) So lets talk about snapchat and some of the things you may not even know about exist on this little app that is in fact, quite powerful.
Snap length. You can set your snaps or videos to run up to 10 seconds if you wish. The little dial is in the lower left hand side. I want to save my selfie! If your picture is safe for the world to see (or normal enough) you can save the shot to your smartphone gallery and to that great storage cloud in the sky by simply clicking on the icon just right of the timer. Text & texting. Snapchat allows video chat and texting as you may already know but you can also add text to your photo or draw on it and those features are self explained on the upper right top of the app. Pinch the letter box to make the letters larger or smaller. The same goes with the emojis if you want to use them. They can be placed anywhere by using your finger to slide them around. Your letter colors can also be changed by the color slider. Face Swapping is fun with teens obviously but if you are an adult and want to be a kid again or had too much to drink, you can use this feature by holding on to your selfie picture until the lens icon shows up. Then you can mess with your face and add goofy things. Videos are fun and you can actually do some effects with them such as speed them up, reverse them or slow them down. Remember the time frame though that you have when being creative with this feature. You can also do video calls with Snapcat or voice calls. Snaps can be replayed up to 24 hours now which was not available some time ago. You can do this one with the person who sent it to you if they enabled this feature themselves. The Video Note Feature allows you to make a slefie GIF for a few seconds by holding down the front facing camera button. again, you have 10 seconds to do this. There are a few other goodies Snapchat has that I won't go into here but these are the fun ones. Get the app and check it all out! Roy FDMC Social and Digital Media We have all seen the recent changes to video apps in the latter part of 2013. Vine, Instagram, Social Cam among others have seen surges in their apps. Times, they are a changing. Social Media is becoming for visual. Instagram however has become the King of Video. Vine you may say has settled in as the Queen. Both have had their moment in the spotlight but Instagram has become more mainstream , more profitable, and more versatile. As more use social platforms for telling their short 30 to 60 second stories, Instagram will skyrocket in 2014. We are a visual society now.
As for the battle between Vine and Instagram, I think Twitter will settle on Instagram to be used in its mix as Facebook (who owns Instagram) has allowed pictures from Twitter to be now used in full without having to link to it. Cutting each other's profit throats is not going to be the solution. Video will surge as a marketing tool. We can also talk YouTube here as well. Besides the other video apps, YouTube will continue to grow as a content marketing tool for showing video. I would be remiss without mentioning SnapChat. This up and coming app also has emerged as a player in video but at the moment lacks marketing and advertising resource tools due to the nature of the videos going to selected groups, its length, and the capability of being removed. Some fine tuning and changes of SnapChat could however, make this app competitive with Instagram and Vine. Keep your visual eyes tuned to the video walls in 2014 and see the changes about to unfold in 2014 as we move from print to visual content! Mobility is no longer a communications utility, but a media distribution hub. Our mobile phones now account for over 10% percent of our media consumption time. So what does this mean? The answer in a nutshell is apps. We spend over 2 hours a day on the average using apps. We don’t even surf the web as much as we use apps on our cell phone. I took a look at the trends users had with apps this past year. For developers and publishers to be successful in mobility, these trends might be helpful for future content as they create apps for mobile devices. Let's take a look at the most popular mobile apps and examine how mobile usage is an addictive activity.
Here's an overview of the top 4 trends with apps.
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