Why Snapchat is quickly becoming the best social media platform for recording artists
The way artists and influencers connect with their fans on social media is rapidly changing. Over the years there have been some great product innovations that changed social media and how influencers interacted with their audience. Snapchat was behind most of this with game changing product features like ‘Stories’, ‘Lenses’ and ‘Filters’, and instagram quick to copy. With all of this in mind I believe snap’s best innovations are yet to come. The future of snapchat may change the way influencers interact with their audience for the better. The following reasons are why I believe Snapchat is positioned to become the best platform social media platform for recording artists to market themselves.
1.Superior Branding compared to other platforms
On snapchat, artists are able to have very strong brand awareness across the platform by having branded sharable interactive content. Such as custom stickers, filters, lenses, and stories. For instance, when drake’s recent album ‘Scorpion’ dropped snapchat was littered with little pieces of content that pertained to drake hidden in the core user experience of Snapchat.
By having a custom lens or sticker this allows artists to be incorporated with user generated content in a low friction way. This sets up a loop of virality for the artist’s music. This is the same principle that allowed songs to blow up on Vine. Snapchat’s ‘Your take’ story provides an outlet for the community to voice their opinion in an organized fashion thanks to Snap’s content review team. The review team always surfaces both perspectives of a subject matter in an unbiased manner. This prevents the echo chamber issues that plague other social media platforms. Snap’s users are able to better articulate their opinions and contribute to a conversation in a way that a tweet or an instagram comment will not allow. If you’re thinking these marketing strategies are just for big time artists like Drake who have the resources to do anything, even smaller or independent artists can create their own custom lenses with Lens studio or create their own filters within snapchat.
Artists are able to attach snippets of their music to lenses, making an easily sharable, and discoverable pieces of user generated content that has the potential to spread like wildfire. For instance, if an artist creates a eye catching or ‘meme’ type of lens this can draw audiences in without them even hearing the music first. This is exactly what artist ‘Blackbear’ did with his new snap lens. lets use this as an example.
Picture the following Scenario
An influencer — in this case Blackbear posts a story with a lens which includes a snippet of a new song. With a Call to action saying ‘Try lens”
A user unlocks the lens, and starts experimenting with it.
The user hears the song and wants to hear more.
They immediately go to spotify or apple music and look at recent releases from the artist, in this case blackbear.
The user streams the song, likes it and adds it to their library.
After this, the user sends snaps to their friends or posts to story with the lens.
This is the ideal user journey that a user would take from the influencer’s perspective.
It’s 2018, people are tired of old fashioned intrusive ad formats that take away from the UX of products. By having branded snap filters and lenses influencers and companies are able to advertise without taking away from the core experience. But Rather add to it by providing a fun delightful experience to the user. The future of ads in the AR medium will not longer just be passive(videos, pop ups etc) but become increasingly engaging, personal, gamified, and fun.
2.Ticket purchases in Snapchat with Seatgeek and E-commerce integration
Snaps recent partnership with Seatgeek allows users to buy tickets to events right in the application. This allows a more direct to consumer pipeline than any other current ticket purchasing platform. The demographics of Snapchat’s user base and average music consumer align perfectly. Think of your average festival attendee or concert go-er of todays most popular artists. peoplewho pay money for music related products and experiences(festivals, merch, collectables etc) are likely to be young and likely active on social media, especially snapchat. When you go to a concert today you will easily see more than half of the crowd recording performances and taking selfies all to than be posted or sent on snapchat.
Lets look at the typical flow and current problems that users endure to purchase tickets and items on instagram.
Other options
As you can see, webviews has a very clunky experience. Pages load slow and websites are not as responsive as text over laps with elements. When a user scrolls up and down to look at items for instance it is easy to exit the experience, causing them to re input info into forms. This causes a lot of friction and can lead to users just giving up, reducing conversions on sales. A lot of different influencers sell different products across different websites causing users to re enter their info repeatedly or sign up for accounts. On snapchat, webviews have an autofill feature where users can send their account info and more just by tapping
3. Snapstore
On snapchat, when users purchase items their shipping and payment information can be stored for later use. Greatly reducing friction and annoyance when dealing with forms.
The snapstore in its current iteration has a long way to go. But the potential for this is huge for influencers and brands. Instead of having a swipe up link and bouncing users to other platforms keeping the user within snapchat allows for a more concrete and polished e- commerce experience. Snapchat’s product and brand has an inherent level of trust and transparency with users from the beginning of its creation. From snaps data minimization practices to content review, users trust snapchat. Influencers can use this to their advantage to potentially increase conversions. If a product is being sold on snapchat, users know that it is legitimate. Since snapchat is used very regularly amongst users for communication it is opened 25x a day. This means that just because a user sees your product or story once and bounces, they are likely to see it again and may convert. Sort of like when you walk by that store on your way to work everyday and you finally decide to go in and check it out.
4. Snapcodes
Snapcodes allow users to unlock exclusive content. This presents a unique opportunity for venues and artists to enhance the live concert experience. By adding snapcodes to tickets or printing them out and putting them on physical objects within the venue. Venues, artists, and festivals can give exclusive content like filters and lenses or link to merch on their websites with snapcodes. Concert go-ers will be snapping anyway, by adding exclusive content this can encourage users to include them in their snaps.
Conclusion
Music is culture. Snapchat is culture. For the GenZ demographic, Snapchat has changed the way we communicate, capture, consume content, and soon buy products.When we are at concerts we snap. When something crazy happens we snap. When we eat good food we snap. There are an endless list of triggers. However, the potential of snapchat remains largely untapped. This is where Genz’s attention and eyeballs are, and influencers and brands can take full advantage of this to hyper target the GenZ demographic. One thing is for certain, the intersection of music and AR content is here and snapchat is at the forefront of this. This is an opportunity you don’t want to miss.
Questions? comments? You can reach me at https://www.nicklamela.design/ or nlamela@tradecrafted.com
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