How to Monetize a Snapchat — Best 6 Ideas

Everyone is familiar with the infamous dog filter that can be spotted everywhere on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. For those who do not know where did that filter come from, it is the creation of Snapchat along with hundreds of other interactive filters.

Snapchat is an application that was developed by Bob Murthy, Reggie Brown, and Evan Spiegel in 2011 to give people an outlet for sharing videos and images. Known for its unique specification that deletes a message after someone has viewed it, it soon became a trustworthy app for people to share audacious and weird pictures with complete confidence privacy.

However, Snapchat is so much more than just taking selfies. It has a Discover section where solid media outlets, celebrities, brands, and businesses can publish content from their websites. Moreover, as of Q4 2020, the app has 265 million daily active users worldwide. So, so many people on Snapchat create an opportunity for not just brands and businesses but also affiliate marketers to earn from Snapchat.

People find it easy to directly swipe up from a story (Story Ads) or even directly shop from the app without having to go anywhere (Collection Ads), which makes it all too favorable for monetization. So, let’s talk about Snapchat monetization and the best Snapchat monetization practices to get you earning in no time:

Why Should You Monetize Your Snapchat Account

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room first of all.

Why should you even care about Snapchat in the first place when there are so many other special media platforms out there?

Well, we agree with the fact that Snapchat is just a few years old, but its effects have been felt all over the world. According to Sandvine, it is the 2nd app globally in terms of overall mobile, and with 300 million downloads, it is also one of the most used apps. But that is not even the most surprising part about the app. The company reported in 2020 that the daily active Snapchat user uses the app’s camera more than 20 times every day.

Then, it is very appealing to people aged between 13 and 29 years, so they are on the app a lot. With the Gen Z $44 billion spending power, these statistics about Snapchat are more than jaw-dropping impressive. Plus, the older generation has also begun catching on.

With high engagement rates, imagine the fortune you can create for yourself if you learn to leverage the app’s engagement and monetize your Snapchat account. The statistics are here to prove that it is much better than other apps.

How to Build a Snapchat Audience for Snapchat Monetization

With GenZ (it is also the most popular social media platform among teens) and Millenials spending a lot of their time on Snapchat, the app’s business potential keeps increasing every day. However, the business potential does not count for anything if you do not have an audience.

So, before we even delve into the best Snapchat monetization practices, here are some of the best tips on how to build a lucrative Snapchat audience for monetization:

• Promote other users on Snapchat, and they will give you a follow. In other words, you ask someone to do a “follow for shoutout.”
• Always include your Snapcode in your content that you post on other platforms or your blogs.
• Use your connections and following on other social media platforms to grow your audience on Snapchat. Offer your audience sneak peaks, snippets, teasers, trailers, discounts, exciting offers, etc., to show them how they will benefit from your account if and when they follow you.
• Try getting shoutouts on from users with a vast following. For this, you can talk to Snapchat influencers to give you a shoutout verbally or share your account with their audience. This will boost your follower count, audience and increase the traffic to your account.
• Stay consistent with your posting. People often unfollow people who are non-consistent. Sure, you can share content related to your brand quite a few times a day. However, you need to be careful so you do not end up overdoing it.
• Use message boards to network with other social media users. You can even share your contact information while you are at it.

Keep these simple but effective tips in mind. Remember that you need an engaging audience if you want to monetize your account.

6 Best Snapchat Monetization Practices

After you have built a decent following for your Snapchat handle, you can leverage your account to earn yourself more money. But the question is, how does one go on and about making loads of money with Snapchat? Well, here are some tried and tested methods to make money by monetizing Snapchat.

1. Create and Advertise Content and Products

If you have been on social media even for once in your life, be it Snapchat, Instagram, or TikTok, you may have noticed that people with a lot of followers usually have top-notch quality posts. This applies to both the content created and the quality of photos and videos posted. The reason why influencers and brands invest so much time in their posts is that quality is everything.

So, you want to earn from social media? You have to capture people’s attention. According to a study conducted by Microsoft in 2000, the average human’s attention span was only 12 seconds which dropped to merely 8 seconds almost 15 years later. Another recent study performed by the Technical University of Denmark explains the abundance of information presented to people on social media to be the reason for the decrease in our collective global attention span.

Ensure that you can capture people’s interest and persuade them to follow a specific path and take action. And the type of connection you can have with your audience largely relies on the quality of the content you post and how engaging it is.

To stand out from a sea of Snapchat influencers and brands, use the tools available to you from the courtesy of Snapchat. However, you still need to think outside the box because everyone on the internet trying to make a living on Snapchat is using the same tools. Keep your target clients in your mind and prepare a checklist of their pain points. Try to tailor your content around their pain points and offer them products or solutions for their problems.

Speaking of products, you can also use digital products that work with your brand, such as ebooks, audio programs, video courses, etc. Or you can go for third-party or proprietary products. You just need to provide a solution to a problem to blow your sales through the roof.

A great example of using Snapchat to advertise a product is a young business called She’s Birdie. Their safety alarm poses as a solution for women who feel unsafe when going out on their own.

1. Design a Geo-Filter (For Brand Campaigning)

Snapchat is full of young and diverse people looking to have fun. Since the marketing efforts of Snapchat are focused on the interests and likes of Millenials, the majority of its users are less than 25 years old. Naturally, the biggest user base for Snapchat is located in the US, which holds an audience of 108 million Snapchat users as of January 2021 as reported by Statista. The US Snapchat users are followed by India with 74.35 million users. The famous photo-sharing platform is predicted to gain about 400 million global users by the year 2024. Moreover, according to Investor Relations, over 75% of Snapchat users fall in the age group of 13–34-year-old people, and 58% of them are female while the males are 40%.

With so many people from all over the world using Snapchat, just imagine what it can do for your brand or your content if you market it correctly. Using Geo Filters is one of the most common ways to monetize Snapchat. Geo Filters work best for brand campaigns designed to create awareness among people rather than driving traffic to registrations, app installations, or websites.

Some of the most common examples of brands and businesses using Geo Filters to increase their brand awareness are Taco Bell, Comedy Central, and New York Fashion Week. These filters don’t have any swipe-up link that leads people somewhere. They are just pretty texts and images that prompt people to look up the event or deal or show going on or coming up.

2. Gain Opportunities Through Story Ads

Story Ads are a great way of building awareness for your brand, business, or product. People who are on Snapchat daily view an ad every day. Yes, they can skip the ad if they want, but it’s a proven-to-be-effective way of getting your business or brand in front of millions of people watching from all across the world. Depending on your location, some ads may not be accessible to you, but you can use different apps to bypass this limitation imposed by Snapchat.

Like Facebook, Snapchat also offers a practical and convenient ad manager which you can use to create your ads and target your desired audience.

So, how do story ads appear to your audience?

A Story Ad appears on Snapchat’s Discover feed. Brands use Story Ads for mass promotions and advertising. Gatorade is one of the big names that are known to use Story Ads to promote their product. The Story Ad for Gatorade can be seen in the Discover section somewhere in between other stories. However, it has a tag saying “Ad” to differentiate it from everyday stories.

After you have launched a Story Ad campaign, you can track your performance and get excellent results. The statistics you receive from your campaign will help you optimize your campaign for more significant results and better reach and effectiveness.

3. Advertise Through Sponsored Posts and Lenses

Aside from using Geo Filters and Story Ads, you can also earn some good money using lenses. In this feature, when a person opens their Snapchat account to use its camera, the lens appears with a pre-existing design and lets people snap through it.

This way of monetizing through Snapchat is nothing short of uniqueness and creativity. Apart from regular lenses, you can use sponsored lenses. To get a sponsored lens, you need to get in touch with the official people on Snapchat. The professionals there listen to your goals, ideas, and your requirements and then design a unique lens for you.

One lens you might have encountered on Snapchat was the Apple’s Beats that appeared right before the Black Friday sale. It was created to skyrocket the sales for the product just in time for the most famous sale of the year.

When your sponsored lens gets shared, it is just like getting recommended to someone. It’s an exceptional idea for advertising because of its direct marketing aspect.

Besides, you can also make use of sponsored posts. Sponsored posts are designed specially to promote and market something. If that’s what you want to go for, then you can create a business page to share your work and invite people into your world. A business page on Snapchat lets you reach a wider audience and increase your engagement and sales. Buzzfeed has a business page on Snapchat.

4. AR Lenses

AR Lenses have monetized a classic and simple Snapchat interaction. The amusing and flattering filters of Snapchat were the very first reason why people were drawn to Snapchat in the first place. Who doesn’t want people to see them with a face so chiseled and perfectly contoured and skin so smooth that everyone gets envious? AR lenses allow brands to design interactive moments with the help of augmented reality. Snapchatters can stick out their dog tongue, puke a rainbow, flip-up sunglasses, shake their head to make the fire go up, all with a mini brand logo present in the corner.

 You can find two types of lenses on Snapchat, the Face Lens and the World Lens. Face Lenses usually feature some sort of innovative technology to recognize a user’s head, mouth, or eyes to transform them into the characters you have created.

A World Lens, on the other hand, detects a user’s location to map the environment around them. Snapchatters can use their rear-facing camera (the one at the back) to look at the world in a different light. These AR lenses by Stanger Things are interesting and interactive and do a great job of promoting an upcoming season of the show.

When you use AR lenses, you need to follow some logical restrictions that include not using any profanity or altering the user’s skin color or race. Other than that, the world is your oyster, and you can do whatever you can when it comes to Snapchat Ads.

Remember, to feature your brand’s name or logo on the lens. Do not obscure the face of the person viewing the lens with the brand logo. According to Snapchat’s recommendation, the best place for a logo or a name is in the top right or left corner. Snapchat will show a “SPONSORED” tag on your ad, but it will disappear after two seconds.

5. Collection Ads (and Snap Ads)

Snapchat rolled out Collection Ads in the most recent development of its programmatic offering. Collection Ads lets advertisers and brands display a series of products while giving users a seamless and fun way to shop and buy at the same time. In case you have not encountered a Collection Ad in real-time yet, it is a Snapchat video ad that has a ribbon of thumbnail-sized products at its bottom.

You can make a Collection Ad based on a product catalog, thus, letting your products be dynamic. Or you can go down the manual road and create them manually via uploaded tile images. Collection Ads require more pieces than simple ads on Snapchat, so you need to fill out more requirements in the Ads Manager, such as the swipe up URLs, unique links, and calls to action before Snapchat applies “AD” denotation.

Collection Ads and Snap Ads work better for affiliates (and brands too). Both are paid advertising options available in the app to market something. The only difference is that Snap Ads are used to drive traffic to websites and generate leads. They have a swipe-up option that redirects users to a website, landing page, or app. Snap Ads are also the most frequently used ad types.

Collection Ads are more e-commerce product-centered. They let you showcase different shapes, sizes, and colors of advertised products in one story. One great perk of collection Ads is that you can attach a unique link with every picture. Wish is one of the many businesses for which collection ads can be seen on Snapchat.

How Much Can You Earn With Snapchat

With Snapchat and the money you earn, it is pretty hard to decipher a solid number. Even though it is hard to put down a specific amount when it comes to Snapchat influencer earnings, one certain thing is that the more popular you are on Snapchat, the more influential you will be. As a result, the higher your earnings will be. According to an estimate, a beginner influencer can earn $500 per one campaign, which ends 24 hours. So, the price fluctuates. However, it relies on some factors which can be improved to earn more:

• Level of engagement on a person’s posts.
• Numbers of followers and fans.
• Number of posts (pictures/videos) agreed upon.
• The promotion of the product is supposed to occur (is it on the influencer’s personal account, or is there a need for cross-posting).
• Compatibility of the influencer or celebrity with the product or brand to be promoted.
• The types of posts agreed upon (photo, or video, or both).
• The kind of effort required from the influencer. For example, are the videos or photos of the product provided, or do the influencers have to shoot the content themselves?

The stronger of a contender you are in regard to the points mentioned above, the higher your earnings are going to be.

Popular Snapchat Influencers

We live in a reality where physical communication is not the ideal deal at the moment (Covid-19 we are looking at you), so it is not a surprise that Snapchat influencers have become the hype. Here are some popular Snapchat influencers that are known for their awesome content.
 

• Frankie Greek

Frankie Greek is a “Snapchat journalist” based in New York, whose expertise lies in hosting Snapchat Takeovers. She also develops Snapchat marketing strategies for media companies and brands, including Fuse, Thrillist, Fox, etc. Greek uses her engaging storytelling to her advantage in Snapchat’s short-form videos.
 

• CyreneQ

CyreneQ’s, a graphic designer and an amazing artist by trade is among Snapchat’s most popular digital influencers owing to her creative Snapchat doodles. Besides helping brands strategize their Snapchat content, she was also a finalist for the Snapchatter of the Year Shorty Award 2015.
 

• Nicol Concilio

Nicol Concilio, a makeup artist, is a Snapchat influencer with 874K subscribers on YouTube and 1.2M followers on Instagram. She has been nominated thrice as the YouTube Artist of the Month by Star Central. Nicol pursued singing as a career after high school but is now a full-time Snapchatter and vlogger.

Conclusion

If you want to monetize your Snapchat too successfully, you need to grow your followers and create engaging content. Besides the several paid advertising options, you can also use offer-oriented Snapchat. Take your time, let your audience build up, grow, and then start snapping. Never forget that engagement is necessary if you want to run running offers on Snapchat.