Snap Snap! Snapping all the way Snapchat has topped the social platform with 25 million users only in the United States. 75% of the college students use Snapchat daily while 55% of students would like to purchase a product if there’s a coupon available.

Snapchat reaches to 40% of all 18 to 35-year-olds in the States. For your surprise, almost half of the new users signing up are over 25 years. Provided with the app’s insanely growing popularity, it’s hard to believe that Snapchat was launched only five years back in 2011. Over 150 million followers use Snapchat to watch 10 billion videos every day. Intended for a savvy social media marketer, users’ figure may read as 10 billion daily opportunities to build awareness of your brand.

Well if you’re not accustomed with the app, here’s what you need to know: a person or a brand can send photos or videos—called Snaps—to their friends and followers on Snapchat. These Snaps can then be viewed for 10 seconds after which they disappear. Colourful filters, messaging, face-swapping properties, and other humorous functions have made this app wildly successful with people of all ages.

If you’re not ready using Snapchat as part of your marketing strategy in 2016, you should be check out this guide to help you get started:

Emphasise Social Events

If you’re planning to be a part of live events, then Snapchat is a great tool to leverage. Social Events as anniversaries, grand openings, trade shows, charity events, etc. can be shared on Snapchat, giving you an ultimate platform to highlight these events. It gives your audience members direct access to your live event, no matter where they are.

Mock Fans with Exciting New Products

Few brands still mislead that social media involvement can be self-destructive and lead to a host of problems with managing user engagement. But others disagree, with more marketers jumping in each day; they predict a serious impact with product launches using apps like Snapchat.

Snapchat is an ideal platform to start teasing out videos and pictures of new products. Because these images last only for a few seconds, you can anticipate a fair amount of buzz and chatter to surge around your new offering.

Keep it Fancy

Snapchat is a casual social media app. You can’t portray serious stuff and expect viewers’ attention. Your followers aren’t fascinated by all corporate stuffiness – they look out for fancy colour, action and fun.

At the same time, you must maintain some professionalism suitable to the nature of the audience. Snapchat viewers are young with the average user age group between12-34. That means the followers can be tempted with the Disney backdrop with content focused on a general audience.

Pull Out the Curtain

With Snapchat take your followers beyond raw products and solutions so you can engage the following community more. Get them behind the scenes and show off your company. Utilise Snapchat and show off your corporate culture with a tinge of fun filled drawing tools and caption options. Avail the opportunity from Snapchat to illustrate your fans about how different your brand is from your competitors’.

If you want to mix it up behind the scenes, turn around control for your Snapchat account among your trusted employees. Give each of them the control of it for a day or so. This will add a great sense of variety and flavour for your fans. Just be sure enough to set some guidelines to keep the “bad stuff” from popping up.

Tell a Great Story

In any channel videos should be short and snappy. With Snapchat, it is true. The audiences look for brief content to digest while in line, sitting in the class or might be on a short break at work. Feed them with brief content & they’ll gobble it up.

Snapchat is working great as the videos in it are limited to 10 seconds. Stick to the playing time as you can make multiple video clips. String the videos together to frame a story, which followers can go through all at once when they have time.

Propose Stirring incentives

Here’s where Snapchat can fetch you real footfalls if you hold a physical business: incentives.

Incentives form a typical marketing strategy, and an expected staple within the social media. Businesses frequently host giveaways and sweepstakes asking fans to like, share, retweet and comment for an opportunity to win something big.

Snapchat can also be implemented the same way. In actual fact, an impressive 55% of college students stated they would more likely buy from any company if they offer a coupon using Snapchat.

So, can Snapchat actually impel more customers to your website or business? The answer is a big “yes.”

If you haven’t started using Snapchat as part of your marketing strategy, then you’re definitely missing out the opportunities to connect with pertinent group of targeted audience.