Snapchat continues to expand organic marketing features

Following on from the recent launch of Snapchat Brand Profiles, Snapchat has announced yet another valuable feature for bricks and mortar businesses and organisations with its new My Places feature, via Snap Map.

Team Snap, Newsroom

“With My Places, Snapchatters can discover more than 30 million businesses, log their favourite local spots, and even find personalised recommendations informed by their friends and the global Snapchat community.”

My Places has three tabs:

• Visited. All the places you’ve checked into on Snapchat can be found here.
• Favourites. Favourites will be home to your favourite saves.
• Popular. Snapchat will use an algorithm to provide users with personalised recommendations based on where a user is, what they’ve tagged or favourites, where friends are and where other Snapchat users have visited.

The Popular tab is a handy point of difference for My Places as it competes with Google Maps and Apple Maps for relevance in this field as you can’t see where friends have visited on the latter, but you can via Snap.

With Snapchat enjoying over 250 million monthly active users on Snap Map, this is the chance for bricks and mortar outlets to boost footfall by placing their brand in front of an engaged audience – a Snapchat survey showed 44% of users will use Snap Map to find places around them.

Companies who want exposure to a younger audience need to pay attention as Snapchat reaches 90% of 13-24-year-olds in the US – more than the combined might of Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.

The picture locally appears to be equally strong with younger demographics, according to Snapchat.

Evan Spiegel, Snap CEO, Snapchat 2019 ‘Partner Summit’ 

“In fact, we reach more 13 to 24-year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the U.K., France, Canada and Australia.”

Additionally, a Snapchat update called Layers was launched in May that allows partners to add data directly to the map. The Infatuation – a restaurant recommendation website – has signed up, and Layers will be integrated Layers Snap Map and My Places later this year.

Get on the map

Snap Map’s data comes from MapBox, so you need to get yourself listed via MapBox. You can suggest a Place Listing addition via the Map or Map settings.

Changes to your business can be made via a request to update the Snap Map, and it would be well worth checking out what info your business is displaying.

You could also run a promotion on Snap Map via a Promote Local Place campaign to be featured. Eventually, Snapchat will run more integrations that’ll allow the direct purchase of items within the app.

A global hub

For those unfamiliar with Snap Map, it’s a global hub of activity. Anyone can submit their snaps to Snap Map, and they become visible to anyone who zooms in on their local area.

Snapchat Support

“On Snap Map, you can view Snaps submitted to Snap Map from all across the world – including sporting events, celebrations, breaking news and more. You and your friends can also share your locations with each other and see what’s going on around you.”

You can also find Stories, Friends and Places by selecting from the different options at the bottom of the screen.

Strong performance

Snapchat makes this announcement off the back of some substantial Q2 numbers. Ad spend and daily active users grew at a healthy tick, while year-on-year growth was at 23%.

Revenue for Q2 2021 reached $982 million, and the app now has 293 million daily active users. For context, that’s more than Twitter (192 million) and Reddit (52 million).

In addition, Snap’s TikTok competitor Spotlight also saw good growth, with over 125 million Snapchatters using the application in March 2021 alone.

A great opportunity

With user numbers climbing and increased investment in the platform, businesses need to get Snap-savvy, especially if they want to appeal to U24s.

Being on Snap Map can increase exposure, organic reach and word-of-mouth performance for businesses of all types, and it can be done with a small time investment. What’s not to love?