Snapchat is one of the most influential social media stories this decade, rising from 0 users when it was first released in September 2011 to nearly 161 million active monthly users in just 5 years. It featured the concept of “stories” that disappeared after just 24 hours and it then utilized the Viola-Jones Algorithm to put “Filters” onto people’s faces to try and make these 10-second stories even more popular. It worked and Snapchat went viral. The craze for stories has refused to leave us ever since and now even the world’s most popular networking site Facebook, including its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp, have also added the feature adding stories that disappear after 24 hours.

Users visit Snapchat at least 18 times a day to check on stories that will go away forever in a day. The high user engagement that the concept of disappearing stories brings to the table provides the perfect opportunity for brands to secure the maximum amount of engagement and exposure and the most vital component in this new branding strategy will be logos.

The prominence of Logos

The ads run by Snapchat are short, not more than 10 seconds, which is not enough time to put forward a full-length 30-second ad. The time allotted to each brand is short and the only tool that can appear in the most prominent manner is the logo of the business itself. The logo can be there for the full length of the ad and establish an omnipresent appearance till the ad disappears. The ads are in vertical video format, which means that the logo can be cascaded on either side of the screen pane quite easily.

Your logo will also be one of the crucial and defining components of people recognizing and finding you on Snapchat. The Ghostface Chillah icon of Snapchat retains its overall shape while you are only allowed to fit in your image within the white space available on the Ghostface. Your logo should primarily feature inside that white space as it allows people to recognize you more easily instead of using an image which might turn out to be vague.

Your logo can also feature inside the filters which Snapchat uses and have proved so high on engagement. Snapchat now provides the option of having customized Geo-Filters for your brand where your logo can be incorporated more smoothly.

Goal Based Bidding:

People viewing your ads as much as possible was the singular for advertisers in the days gone by, but recently Snapchat introduced the concept of “Goal-based bidding”, whereby a brand can set an entirely different set of goals other than just people viewing the ad. The word engagement has gone on to a whole different level with this as advertisers can now bid for those type of ads where people actually interact with them to qualify as a valuable ad view.

To put it more simply, the advertiser is now in a position that it will only pay for those ad views where an engagement, such as the user making a swipe within the ad to be redirected to a further platform, has happened. Through this, Snapchat has given more power to advertisers of the kind of goals they want to achieve through their campaigns and your logo design would be one of the biggest components that advertisers would try and utilize to increase engagement. A bad logo design would not only turn off the user but it would also lead to zero action engagement. The viewer would just view the ad and move on. No quantifiable results achieved.

The logo is no longer just a static image that lurks on your website, app or ads but its purpose would now stand redefined as it would bring in firstly, it would make the people recognize the brand even in a short ad, secondly if it’s there, it needs to bring in engagement and entice the user to go further through the funnel. It’s a highly powerful tool you can utilize as a brand to bring in conversions and increase the traffic towards a wide variety of things like in-app purchases, free trials and more. Getting a great, impressive, high quality and immersive logo design is immensely important for brands that want to make use of the new phenomenon in advertising. The craze for stories refuses to go away and nearly every platform is adding them to their repertoire. It’s high time you get going and optimize your brand through this amazing, fun and interactive new trend to hit the social media platforms.