Snapchat stories: how to share, how to store, and how to measure

In this fourth edited extract from my ebook Snapchat for Journalists, I look at ways of saving Snapchat stories, sharing them across other platforms and driving traffic, and various metrics and methods for measuring impact.

This is an extract from Snapchat for Journalists. You can buy it on Leanpub here.

Sharing your Snapchat Story

Each snap in a story only lasts for 24 hours, and it’s worth thinking about sharing them before they have finished.

Of course you cannot share a link to your Snapchat story: people need to be following you on Snapchat and checking it for notifications. Whenever you add a new snap to your story, they will receive a notification in Snapchat.

To share it, then, you need to tell people your username and invite them to follow your story on Snapchat.

If you’re feeling confident, you can also share your ‘snapcode’ image: this is the yellow rounded edge square on your Snapchat profile with an image in the middle (take a screenshot or share it from within the app).

Users can add you by saving that Snapcode to their photos, and then selecting it from the Snapchat ‘Add friends > Add by Snapcode’ menu option.

Metrics

While your story is live you can see how many people have viewed it.

You can do this by swiping right-to-left so that you are on the ‘Stories’ page in Snapchat. At the top of that screen will be your story (‘My story’). If you tap the three dots to the right of that, your story will expand so you can see each snap in that story.

Next to each snap is an eye and a number representing the number of views each snap has had

To the right of each snap you should see an eye icon and a number, representing how many people have viewed that particular snap (if there is no eye/number then it hasn’t been seen at all yet).

You can also swipe up to see which specific users have seen that snap.

This Snapchat gif shows how to access each snap’s metrics

Some snaps will have more views than others, either because people stopped halfway through your story, or because at that point that snap was the latest part in the story and they haven’t checked back since.

If a lot of people are abandoning your story at a particular point, however, you might get an indication of that here. And you can delete problematic snaps (perhaps a video which was too long, or too boring) by tapping on that snap in this view.

Once you tap on any individual snap, it will replay on your screen. At the bottom, however, you will also see 4 options:

• The ‘eye’ icon tells you how many views that particular snap has had
• The double arrows icon tells you how many screenshots have been taken of this snap
• The bin icon is where you can delete this snap from your story
• The downward-pointing arrow allows you to download this snap to your phone’s photo roll

Storing your Snapchat story

In addition to the option above to save each snap separately to your photo roll, you can also save the whole story to your phone’s photo roll, by tapping on the three dots to expand your story as detailed above, and then tapping on the downward-arrow-within-a-circle which then appears next to those three dots.

The story will be downloaded as a single vertical video file. You can then email this to yourself and upload it to YouTube: the mobile app will play this fine if on a mobile device, and you can also embed it vertically on sites like Wordpress.