SO BASIC: A SNAPCHAT GUIDE FOR TRAVELERS OVER 30
Fathom’s resident young person Daniel Schwartz wrote a step-by-step guide to understanding and using Snapchat for travelers who weren’t introduced to it in college. He shares his favorite travel accounts on Snapchat at the bottom of the page.
By Daniel Schwartz for Fathom
FATHOM HQ — As the youngest member of Team Fathom, it’s my duty to teach the office about Snapchat, the social media app that, for a while now, has been making waves with teens, celebrities, corporations, and influencers of Instagram fame. But as time-crunched adults (eternally young and always traveling), they’ve had trouble grasping why and how to use Snapchat on the go. If you’re in a similar bind, this elementary guide covers all the basics.
WHAT IS SNAPCHAT?
Snapchat is a smartphone-only social network that allows users to create multimedia messages (known as “snaps”) that dissapear after preset periods of time. Snaps are highly customizable, which is a major part of the appeal, and can be shared privately with select friends or publicly with all followers.
WHAT MAKES SNAPCHAT DIFFERENT?
Though once used primarily for sending nudes, Snapchat has evolved into another form of voyeuristic storytelling entirely, a platform where everyone shares their lives in short, ephemeral snippets. Because snaps eventually vanish, Snapchat is less about immortalizing highlights and more a vehicle for democratically sharing your point of view. While influencers rule Instagram, grandmas colonize Facebook, and headlines overtake Twitter, you and I (and Kylie Jenner) use Snapchat.
WHY SHOULD I START USING SNAPCHAT?
Because you want to share the journey and not just the destination. And you want to have fun in the process. You say you have not time nor urge to share trivialities? Snapchat isn’t for everyone, but travelers that feel limited by the highly curated nature of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter can use the app as an alternative for posting photos and videos of small but significant moments that don’t look like a million bucks. Plus, Snapchat won’t clog up your camera roll with photos you will never look at twice. The reality is, we connect most effectively over mundane but relatable moments. And there’s no shame in that.
WHAT MAKES IT SO GOOD FOR TRAVELERS?
At the very least, it’s a great platform for spectating. Sit back and look inside the private lives of your favorite travelers. Their Snapchat updates peek behind the veil of their Instagram accounts, affording you versions of their lives that aren’t over-edited and highly curated, but raw and real and relatable. When they travel, you’re with them every step of the way: through the airport, inside the hotel room, at lunch, out shopping, and during late-night shenanigans.
Snapchat is all-inclusive. Nothing is permanent and there’s no grading system (likes, hearts, retweets), so you’re free to share a more complete picture of your travels as they unfold. When sharing publicly, your followers (mom, friends, co-workers) can tag along on neighborhood tours, nights out, and not-so-pretty meltdowns. When messaging privately, you can more effectively communicate niche finds (look, you’d love this), inside jokes (look, you won’t believe this), and frustations (look, I can’t with this).
GETTING STARTED
1. Do You Even Have The App?
Snapchat doesn’t exist online. Download it for free from the app store. Sign up and choose your username. You can add friends with Snapchat accounts from your address book before setup is over.
2. First Thing’s Second. Get Acquainted.
You will see your face every time you open Snapchat. Get used to it, as this home screen is also the camera screen. From here, orient yourself with the main screens — keep track of private messages from the inbox on the left, and look at public updates on the right. Your account settings are above. (Memorize this!!) To change screens, tap the cardinal icons (box, three-lines, ghost) or swipe from the edges of the screen. If you get lost, just keep swiping until you see your face.
MAKING AND SENDING SNAPS
Snaps are vehicles of communication on Snapchat. You can view other people’s updates without really knowing how to make snaps, but the creation process is half the fun.
1. Up Your Selfie Game.
Tap the shutter to take photos, hold to shoot video. Easy, right? Here’s where things get interesting. One of Snapchat’s unique and popular features are its ever-changing collection of special effects, called lenses, that transform faces with movie-quality precision. They make you vomit rainbows, give you laser vision, slim your cheekbones, turn you into animals, and mess with your facial proportions.
To unlock them, center the camera on your subject’s face (or your own), then tap and hold the face until a meshwork appears and lenses show up. Mousing over lenses will activate them, though some require facial movement to trigger effects (open mouth to vomit rainbows). Once you find the perfect lens, use the shutter to capture.
2. Tell Me Without Telling Me: Using Filters.
Your snap will live on-screen until you share it. But first, you can customize even more by swiping to add filters like color overlays, a time stamp, a speedometer stamp, frame-rate adjustments (for videos) and, if location tracking is on, a slew of stickers reflecting your time and place: (a dragon sticker when in Chinatown, a trophy sticker during award season, voting results during election season).
3. More is More is More: Adding Text.
If lenses and filters aren’t enough to get the message across, say even more by tapping the screen to add text. The “T” atop the screen will toggle the font from small to large and from left-oriented to centered. Using the large font, scroll the color bar all the way down to turn text black (always a solid color). Drag the text to the desired position (or leave alone), pinching and pivoting to change size and spin. As if you needed more happening, the pencil icon allows you to add a hand-drawn flourish and the post-it button reveals a menu of emojis.
4. Send It Already
When you’re finally ready (this entire process takes less than thirty seconds for teenagers), look down for sharing options. Start from the the bottom left corner.
The timer controls the lifespan of the snap. The download button saves the snap to the camera roll. The square-plus pulls up public sharing options: “My Story” is a highlight reel that all your friends can view, and any other stories that pop up are Live stories curated by Snapchat (more on that later).
Share privately with friends by hitting the lower-right arrow, which pulls up the in-app address book. Select one or multiple friends and send. Hooray. You sent your first snap!
VIEWING PRIVATE MESSAGES
Once your friend recieves your snap, they will (hopefully) snap back. And since private messages are fleeting, be prepared to recieve anything — a spelled-out quip, an ugly selfie, a video in fast-forward. Here’s how to view them and keep the conversation going.
1. Let Me See. Let Me See!
On the home screen, the box indicates when you have new private messages. Swipe right or tap the box for the inbox. New messages are ontop and a record of all messages sent and recieved is displayed below, which is coded red for photo, purple for video, and blue for text. Tap to view photos (look quick, they’re on a timer) or videos. If the snap runs out before you had your fill, hold the message to replay. Each message has one replay, and senders know when you use them. They also know when you screenshot their snap, so don’t try anything sneaky.
2. You’ve Got Mail.
Swipe right on a chat to open the message and respond immediately with words, emojis, or photos from your camera roll. (A recent update allows you to start audio and video calls here, too.) Note that conversations are wiped after exiting chat, though messages can be saved in-thread by tapping them individually. To start a new chat, swipe right on a recent contact or hit the bubble to select a recipient.
A full blue box means you recieved a new chat. Swipe right to open. Respond with text, photos, or emojis. Tap the center circle to bring up the camera if you want to respond with a snap. Tap individual messages to save them within the thread.
USING THE STORIES SCREEN
Snaps that are shared to “My Story” can be viewed when you swipe left from the home screen. You can save story snaps to your camera roll and see who has viewed them using the three dots next to your update reel. Kick back and watch other public stories here too.
1. The Discover Tab
Whether we’re on-the-go or chained to our desk, our wandering minds reach for ever-shorter and sharper media. “Discover” is the answer to short attention spans, a line-up of custom content created by Snapchat’s media partners, like CNN, VICE, VOX, Mashable, and Nat Geo, where a video, photostory, or cultural tidbit serve as a small dose of travel inspiration. Content is distilled with poppy visuals and viral-leaning attitude — fun facts, video loops, wallpapers, and headlines. To view: Select a channel, swipe horizontally to view content, swipe up to see more. A swift downward tug exits the feed, while holding the screen turns the page into a sendable snap.
2. The Live Tab
The live tab is a series of stories curated by Snapchat that capture timely events locally and around the world. Comprised of crowd-sourced snaps, the feature brings new meaning to living vicariously through others. You can virtually attend the Olympics, the Oscars, music festivals, sporting events, and political rallies, as well as enjoy city profiles and local tours. Snapchat populates the live tab by curating their favorites images from Snapchatters who opt to pool their snaps to create 360° perspective of an event.
3. Your Friends’ Stories
If you haven’t figured this out already, stories are thread-together feeds of individual moments shared publicly. This is where you watch Alice Gao (@alice_gao) sip champagne in first class, Erica Firpo (@ericafirpo) lead tours through Rome, Beth Kirby (@localmilk) explore the world as an expecting mom, and Hiroaki Fukuda (@hirozzzz) do his thing in Tokyo. All snaps in the Stories section live for 24 hours. If the person you follow follows you back, you can send them direct comments by swiping up on a snap.
HOW DO I MAKE FRIENDS?
Add friends from the profile page, accessible through the ghost icon at the top of the home screen. The yellow ghost centerpiece (officially dubbed Ghostface Chillah) is embedded with a snap code that carries account information. Photographing the code with the in-app camera adds that account to your friends list.
Alternatively, tap “Add Friends” below the ghost and search for friends with their exact username (there’s no leeway on spelling) or upload a photo of their snap code. Users can share photos of their snap codes by tapping Ghostface Chillah and hitting the share button.
WHO DO I MAKE FRIENDS WITH?
Some of our favorite travelers on Snapchat include: @ericafirpo from Rome, @alice_gao from first class, @localmilk from Instagram, @hirozzzz from Tokyo, @drewak from North Korea, @jessonthames from London, @thomaskakareko from Berlin, @marissacoxparis from Paris, @ggnnitaly84 from Florence, and @allan.hinton from all over.
WANT TO SEE HOW WE DO IT?
Follow us on our travels! We’re @fathomwaytogo on Snapchat.
