Snapchat’s Memories marks the beginning of the Snapchat Marketing Era

Snapchat is so hot right now. And with the release of its new Memories feature, it’s only getting hotter, especially for brands and marketers.

I’ll make a bold prediction: For better or for worse, we’re going to look back on the July 2016 release of Memories as the moment that Snapchat marketing really exploded. And I think that’s exactly what Snapchat was aiming for.

Snapchat’s major shift

The little yellow app has been generating major buzz amongst teens and twenty-somethings for years now, but it’s only been within the last few months that Snapchat seems to have caught on in a big way for older demographics. And aside from its hilarious face lenses and gotta-catch-‘em-all geofilters, there’s been one big thing that has made Snapchat stand out among the familiar social media networks: Its longstanding emphasis on disappearing content.

Messages sent on the platform disappear after they’ve been viewed. Snaps (ten-second photo or video snippets) posted to one’s Story vanish after 24 hours. And up until this week, the only way to mass distribute old Snapchat content was for its original creator to download snaps or stories and then repost them on another network. Within Snapchat, 100% in-the-moment, real-time stories were the name of the game, and their disappearing nature enforced this in spades.

It was the built-in content production limitation, which required all posted content to be created live from within the app, that gave birth to a platform where authentic content ruled. It lent a natural emphasis to raw footage, imperfect in its grainy pixelation, awkward angles, and shaky camera skills. It leveled the playing field so that even the biggest brands in the world were forced to create content based entirely on creativity rather than production value.

So when the Snapchat team dropped news of its latest feature, Memories, earlier this week, many observers were stunned by how far it deviated from the original nature of the app. With Memories, users can replay and repost old content to their stories with a click of a button. And, crucially, for the first time ever, content recorded or edited elsewhere can be shared within your Snapchat story.

This is an absolute game changer for users’ experience of the platform.

Gone are the days when Snapchat content was created fleetingly, ephemerally, without second thought, evaporating into thin air like dust in the wind. For users who were previously content to haphazardly snap their way through their days, taking selfies and videos with a ’90s-camcorder feel, this opens up a whole new world of possibility.

If limitations inspire creativity, as Brian Fanzo is known to say, then a lack of limitations inspires the desire to put one’s best and most professional foot forward. Say hello to the new, more polished, more brand-friendly Snapchat.

The New Snapchat Marketing Era

To put it squarely, Memories makes Snapchat far more palatable to businesses who are considering using it as a marketing platform. The inability to prerecord content or to post branded graphics and videos has long been one the biggest complaints of businesspeople who contemplated jumping on the platform.

Furthermore, it was hard for many brands, accustomed to the virality and long-term nature of posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like, to wrap their heads around why they might invest considerable time and energy into content that will just disappear in 24 hours.

But if you can create content that can be reused over and over again, it’s an entirely different ballgame. Add to that the new ability to share branded or highly produced content, and it’s a hugely pivotal moment for brands considering Snapchat to connect with their audience.

With the newfound ability to upload from the camera roll, for the first time ever it is possible to create Snapchat content that feels closer to YouTube than America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s now possible to overlay a company logo, or to batch content creation into a single day per week, or to get the CEO sign-off on a fully recorded story before it goes live. It’s an entirely different paradigm than the ad-hoc content that the app has required during its previous five years of existence.

To be fair, Snapchat’s Memories doesn’t completely do away with the 24-hour window entirely. Any snap that was created previously, or uploaded from the camera roll, is marked with a timestamp and a notification of its origin. Time will tell if Snapchat users reject brands that rely heavily on pre-produced content. But for now, the window of opportunity to rethink what is possible on Snapchat seems to be wide open.

The next level of social media

So why would Snapchat do away with what was arguably its most defining characteristic? If we’ve learned anything from the company’s strategies thus far, it’s clear that this move was created by design to usher in the next era in social media history. And in that new era, Snapchat is moving boldly from its original status as a peer-to-peer messaging app toward a future as the next-level marketing platform.

It would be naive to think that Snapchat hasn’t been closely watching the ways that Facebook shifted from a company that was struggling to sustain its growing operating costs into a business behemoth, raking in over $1 billion in profit last year alone.

We’ve seen Snapchat start to introduce its own version of ads, mimicking in large degree the model that Facebook used to monetize so quickly over the last few years. But if Snapchat really wants to up the ante and create incentives for businesses to pay to reach their ever-increasing user base, they need to take steps to attract brands to the platform in the first place.

Snapchat Memories might very well be the innovation that’s needed to make more companies take note of the opportunities available on Snapchat. If anything, it’s likely to speed up the tidal wave that was already underway. Welcome to the new Snapchat Marketing Era.