The arguments for and against taking your hotel on Snapchat

With over 350 million monthly active users and around 15 million daily users, Snapchat has quickly become one of the most popular apps in the world, offering a huge potential consumer base for hospitality brands to tap into. The rapidly increasing amount of traffic on Snapchat has already been utilised by numerous global hotel brands but more opportunities exist.

In a growing digital market, it’s becoming increasingly important for hospitality companies to identify and analyse current social media marketing trends as part of their hotel digital marketing strategy. As one of the leading social media platforms, Snapchat can be a powerful marketing tool and can increase customer engagement if utilised correctly. Here are some of the important things to consider when debating whether or not to create a Snapchat profile for your property.

Huge market

The sheer size of Snapchat’s user profile is enough to entice most businesses to jump on board and create a digital presence. With over 14 billion daily video views, there is a massive amount of content being consumed by people all over the world. What’s more, the average daily amount of time spent by each user on Snapchat is around 28 minutes which gives a huge window of opportunity for clever marketing strategists. By tapping into this vast consumer base as part of social media marketing efforts, hotels can engage with a wider audience and improve sales prospects.

Limited demographic

Although there are a growing number of people using Snapchat, research shows that the majority of these users are aged between 18 and 34. This means that hotels operating on the popular app will be marketing themselves primarily to a younger audience. This may create obstacles or challenges for brands aimed towards different demographics. Recent studies have shown that millennials prioritise travel more, so this could be an opportunity to grow direct bookings from a different demographic.

Digestible content

The advantage of using Snapchat as part of your hotel digital marketing strategy is that allows you to create simple and effective content that promotes your brand and informs consumers while being easy to access and digest. The short videos and simplistic image-based content found on Snapchat means that consumers with limited time or that don’t engage in traditional or text-based media can still engage with you. There’s also huge potential to repurpose and redistribute other content and create closer connections with the audience thanks to the more digestible nature.

Limited lifespan

The nature of Snapchat means that any information circulated on the app has a limited lifespan. Self-deleting content and daily stories are easy to consume but only offer a small window of opportunity to promote information. The material that you post on Snapchat will usually only remain on the app for 24 hours which means it may not be seen by as large an audience as expected.

The short lifespan of Snaps means constant updates are required to maintain effectiveness. However, this can be counteracted by supplying links to external sources in order to direct traffic towards your website or digital app.