A Snapchat Account for a Business

A suggestion from the youngest on staff

Sooner or later, the youngest person on staff suggests the business should be on Snapchat. Customers their age open it many times a day, and the business is nowhere in it.

The owner installs it and finds an app that opens straight into the camera. There is no page to fill in, no feed of posts to scroll and no obvious place for a website address.

Photos and short videos, called snaps, disappear once they have been viewed. A story, a string of snaps that anyone who has added you can watch, disappears after a day.

So the question worth answering first is whether your business has any reason to be there at all.

Signs a business belongs there

• Customers under thirty, who check the app many times a day.
• Something visual happening most days, worth a ten-second look.
• Staff who already use it and would enjoy posting.
• A place people visit, rather than work done out of sight.
• News that dates quickly, such as today's conditions or tonight's event.

The second matters most. A story is watched on the day it is posted or not at all, so a business with nothing new to show most days has nothing to post.

What a story can and cannot do

A story is a run of photographs and clips of up to ten seconds each, shown in order and gone after twenty-four hours.

Nobody stumbles across it. Snapchat has no button for passing on someone else's story and no feed that spreads posts to strangers, so the only people who see yours are people who have added you.

And there are no links. Snaps from an ordinary account can show your website address written across them, but nobody can tap it.

That makes Snapchat a way to stay in front of people who already know you. It is not a way to be found.

Getting added at all

Every account has a username and a Snapcode, a yellow square with a pattern of dots that another user scans with the Snapchat camera to add you.

Put the Snapcode where customers already look: on the website, beside the till, on the door and in confirmation emails. Mention the username on your other social accounts too.

Choose the username with care. It cannot be changed later, so it should match the name you use everywhere else as closely as the available names allow.

In the settings, let everyone view your story, so people who add you do not need adding back first.

Whose phone it lives on

Snapchat is built around one person's phone, and a business account usually starts life on the phone of whoever suggested it.

Set it up with a business email address instead, on a phone the business owns. There are no page roles as there are on Facebook, so whoever holds the login holds the account.

Keep the username and password with the business's other account details, and change the password when the person posting leaves.

What is worth posting

What works is what you would tell a regular at the counter: what arrived today, what the morning looks like, what is happening tonight, who is working.

Polish works against you. A quick clip of the real place reads as current, while anything that looks like an advertisement gets tapped past in a second.

Faces need permission. Children need their parents' permission, every time, and the safest stories show the place, the work and the staff rather than the customers.

A worked example

A snowboard school at a local mountain teaches children on weekends, teenagers in after-school programs and adults at night, most of them beginners.

This season an instructor who used Snapchat daily offered to run an account. The school set it up with its own email address on a phone it owns, which goes up the hill with the lead instructor each day.

The stories were simple: the snow at eight in the morning, the lesson board, a beginner's first linked turns filmed from behind, a lift line that was short for once.

Students in the teen programs added the account within weeks. Their parents, who book and pay, mostly never saw it.

That was the mechanism worth noticing. The stories kept teenagers talking about the school, while the bookings still happened on the website, often after a teenager asked to go.

So every story about the spring camps ended with the website address written across the screen, and the Snapcode now goes on every lesson confirmation.

How much time it deserves

A few minutes on the days something is worth showing, and none on the days nothing is. There is no schedule to keep and no need to post daily.

Snapchat shows how many people viewed each snap in a story, and who they were. That is nearly all the measurement there is.

Do not expect it to show up in Analytics. With no links, almost nobody reaches the website from Snapchat directly, even when the stories are working.

Geofilters, briefly

Geofilters are graphic frames that can only be added to snaps taken in a particular place, such as a neighbourhood, a campus or the grounds of an event.

They suit a crowd gathered in one spot more than an ordinary business day. Whether one is offered for your area, and on what terms, is worth checking with Snapchat at the time rather than assuming.

Where it sits beside the website

The website holds everything a customer needs to act: hours, prices, the address, the booking page. Snapchat holds none of it for more than a day.

Any story that asks people to do something should send them to the website, by an address written large enough to read and short enough to remember.

The counter-case

For most businesses whose customers are older, or who sell to other businesses, Snapchat is not worth the time.

Claiming the username is still sensible if your name is distinctive, so nobody else takes it. Leaving the account quiet costs nothing.

Where customers are young and something visual happens most days, a small, regular effort makes sense, provided the account belongs to the business and every story points back to the website.

Before the first story

1. Check the ages of your typical customers.
2. Choose a username matching your other accounts.
3. Register it with a business email address.
4. Use a phone the business owns.
5. Show the Snapcode on the website and counter.
6. Post only when there is something to show.
7. Send every request to the website.

Step four is the one that saves trouble later. An account on a staff member's own phone leaves when they do, along with everyone who added it.

The same ownership problem with video is covered in a YouTube channel under the owner's personal account.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.