What if Snapchat put Places on the Map?
“Places,” a product idea aimed to reinvent the way people discover, review, and share the places that make their moments special.
Stronger support for Places could bring Snapchat one step closer to owning the map. This proposal advocates for Local Business Search and Consumer Reviews as a new social utility in Snap Maps. The goal is to heighten public content by making it easier to find and more usable for both users and businesses. When combined with Snap’s comprehensive location data, Places introduces new oportunitites for innovative localized ad products.
How it exists today…
Every day, millions of Snapchat users stay up to date on their friends’ whereabouts through GeoFilters and SnapMaps. It’s very much an alternative to Foursquare or Swarm. Tagging a Snap with a GeoFilter is the equivalent of a “check in” and SnapMaps is the new format facilitating these location centric status updates.
The goal of Snap Maps is showing you what’s happening now, where it’s happening, and who you could be there with. It encourages you to meet up with nearby friends or join friends that are already having a good time. That being said, locations on the map are more than random coordinate points. In the context of SnapMaps, these places are better described as hangout spots.
So, why is it so hard to find places in Snapchat? In the current implementation, places are invisible. To see Snaps from a specific place, you either need to swipe up on a context card, go to the map and throw darts in the dark, or search and get really lucky. If places are hard to find, it means businesses and their stories are hard to find. As a growing ad-platform that’s meant to surface businesses, this will clearly be an issue moving forward.
Local Search
Places introduces local search to the Snap Map. It’s your guide to businesses and the experiences shared on their stories. Whether you’re looking for nightlife, a trendy coffee shop, or a spot to chill by the beach, local search makes it easy to find a spot to meet-up with friends.
Goal: Create a tool to surface places in the context of your location and the locations of people you spend time with.
*this is not an actual Snap product — mockups designed in sketch
In this SnapMaps search redesign, results are relevant to your current location. Users can Search with standard text, or use categories to explore the variety of places around them. “Popular Nearby” even suggests places around you, right inside the search view.
Places are represented by branded location pins and populate on the Snap Map, alongside your friends’ locations, so you can find the best place to meet-up. The social aspect of Snap Maps is what makes this unique. You can adjust the search area by zooming or panning around the map. This is helpful for finding a place closer to a specific person or group that you may be meeting up with. It’s not simply “Yelp in Snapchat.” There is no other local guide that surfaces places alongside the locations of your friends.
Local Reviews
Local Search makes it easy to find Places on Snapchat. Consequently, users will need a way to compare and evaluate different businesses. The current context cards feature text based reviews from Foursquare and TripAdvisor, but this format is somewhat archaic. Snap has already shown that photo and video is a better way to communicate and tell stories, so why not use the same format to describe your experience?
Goal: Increase public content tagged to businesses and their locations.
Solution: Create a highly visual, low friction, trustworthy consumer review format for business stories.
In this solution, you can review places right in a snap. Rating Stickers are available via GeoFilters. Simply snap a photo or video at the location, select the GeoFilter, and add your Rating Sticker. You can talk to the camera, or use the text/label tool to caption your review.
Our Story is selected by default, but you can always opt-out of sharing publicly. Since this is still a snap, you can send it to your story or friends. Additionally, the “+ Review” button is not limited to the default places filter, it can be applied to any businesses paid geofilter.
Putting reviews right in a snap makes them hard to fake with bots. Rating Stickers feature your bitmoji to add a personal touch without revealing who you are. They’re an easy way to keep reviews honorable since no one trusts an anonymus opinion. Photo/video is not only more descriptive than pure text, it’s another layer of ligitimacy. It’s mobile, verified by GPS (not really but sure), and creative.
Why should Snapchat invest in Places?
With Places, Snap has an opportunity to build a strong platform for localized advertizing. They have the users, the content, and most importantly the location data. Advertisers can target people around their business by serving ads when prospective customers are nearby. Additionally, Snap can show advertisers the direct lift in foot traffic that any ad may have, using their existing ad measurement tech called “Snap To Store.”
Snap To Store — Foot traffic measurement
The main value here is Snap’s unique ability to track geographic conversions. Location is a fundamental aspect of many social platforms but Snapchat is in the best position to capitalize on it. From Geofilters to SnapMaps, every time a user opens Snapchat, their location data is dispatched. According to the 2017 SNAP IPO prospectus, users open the app 18 times a day on average. Assuming even distribution across a 16hr day, location data should update at least once per hour (every 53min).
Advertisers are past the days of paying for clicks and impressions, they want to buy conversions, not online static billboards that may contribute to sales but cannot clearly justify the marketing spend.
In 2017 Snap acquired Placed, an ad measurement startup, to comunicate the positive business implications of marketing with GeoFilters. They compared the number of users exposed to a GeoFilter (viewed in camera, shared direct, viewed on story, etc…) to the ones that actually visited the advertised location within a one week period. Additionally, taking into account users that visited the advertised location without viewing the GeoFilter allowed for a comprehensive analysis of how geofilters can legitimately increase lift. This foot traffic measurement is now called “Snap to Store,” and has the potential to put Snap at the top of the localized ad market.
“Foot traffic into our restaurants is the best measurement of short-term sales success for any program — we want more ad tech like this,”- Brandon Rhoten, head of advertising, digital, social and media at Wendy’s
Monetization & New Ad Formats
The first step to monetizing any database of places is getting business owners to actually claim their locations on a business dashboard.
Goal: Create an incentive to get business owners to claim their business on Snapchat.
Branded location pins aren’t just a fun way to style the map, they’re an answer to a huge issue local ad platforms face: getting businesses to sign up and claim their business. It’s not as simple as building a places database (or paying to use someone else’s). The first step is an account on the SnapForBusiness dashboard. Without that, businesses have no way of managing anything related to the way they exist in Snapchat. Additionally, it’s the gateway to paid business GeoFilters and other localized ad products.
Business that exist in the places database but have not claimed their business on Snapchat would have a default, generic looking, location pin. Claiming your business and branding your pin simply makes your business more prominent and visible to prospective customers on the map.
Snap Ads + Map View
It’s a bit ridiculous that storefront retailers have to advertise their mobile app in Snap Ads. It’s almost like digital infrastructure is a prerequisite for advertising on Snapchat. Yes, there are reasons why advertisers would want to do this. Some special promotions may require an app or a web view, especially if the advertiser wants to collect emails or attract customers to a rewards system. But why can’t they advertise a location?
“I have absolutely no desire to ‘download the chick-fil-a app,’ but if I know there’s one down the street, maybe I’ll have lunch there.”
Snap Ads + Map View lets businesses advertise their location(s) to nearby customers. Snap currently offers 3 basic attachments for the Snap Ads “swipe up” mechanic: + Web View, + App Install, and + Long-Form Video.
+MapView would be the first Snap Ad that serves unique results at runtime. Since the map view incorporates your current location and that of friends on SnapMaps, it’s a very personalized and hyper-targeted ad experience. With the addition of + Map View, retailers can more effectively communicate the presence of their location(s) through Snap Ads.
Sponsored Search Results
This is a time tested ad-format used by almost every major ad platform. Businesses can pay for prioritized placement in search results. In many cases, these ads are so helpful to users that they don’t even seem like ads. They’re relevant thanks to location targeting and can help you find what you're looking for even when you spell the name wrong.
Closing Thoughts
SnapMaps does an excellent job of showing you where friends are. It enables you to meet up with people at moments when you might not have seen them otherwise. But there needs to be more attention on the places that make those moments special.
Business stories are difficult to find and in many cases, the content is lacking. Users should be able to easily surface the places around them, get a sense of the vibe from public snaps, and seamlessly share their own experience.
It’s no secret that Yelp executives drool over the number of food photos sent on Snapchat. That’s because sharing places and experiences is already an existing behavior on the platform. At the same time, this behavior is not utilized to its full potential. From local search to new ad-formats, Snapchat has clear opportunity involving public content and local businesses.
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