Snapchat is everyone’s newest obsession. What was once just a vanishing messaging app for teenagers has become a valuable asset to influencers and big brands all over the world. It is a social platform that has brought a new level of vulnerability and engagement to social media, and I myself am a big believer in connecting 1 on 1 with each and every person.
What is unique about Snapchat is that it disrupted the status quo of social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (although far less than Instagram), they all encourage you to share your “best self.” You don’t post an unedited, 4 am selfie of you and a big bowl of spaghetti on Instagram?—?but you do on Snapchat. In fact, it’s encouraged that you share something like that on Snapchat. Because 24 hours later, it will disappear, so why not? Live a little!
It was the casual nature of the app that drew users in. They could be more “themselves” and less their idealized selves, as shown on other social platforms. But now that Snapchat has been around for a bit, we are all seeing the difference in content being created on Snapchat versus content created elsewhere. Simply put: Snapchat is where you are free to be vulnerable.
However, there is a huge difference between someone who haphazardly posts their most random moments to their Snap story, and someone who does so with a specific intention: to entertain their audience, to highlight a certain aspect of their life, to craft a narrative.
This goes for any social platform, but Snapchat especially: If you want to build an audience and become a gaming influencer on the platform, you have to create your content very deliberately. (And if you just want to post random stuff for your friends, that’s fine too. Just realize they are different.)
In this guide, we are going to get really “in-the-weeds” about how to use Snapchat?—?everything from storytelling techniques, how to space out your Snaps throughout the day, how to get more views on your content, when to use Memories, best practices for engaging with followers, and more. The goal is for you to be prepared to tackle the platform and build yourself into a Snapchat influencer by the time you finish reading this guide.
Let’s get started.
Every good story has a beginning, middle, and end: Rising action, a climax, and then descending action.
Most movies, novels, even lengthy short stories spend quite a bit of time building up to the moment of rising action?—?that’s where you start really getting into it. Then the rising action is stretched out all the way to the climax. And then right after the climax, there is a period of descending action where you, the reader or viewer, is able to see the consequences that unfold because of that climactic moment.
Then, of course, there are variations: you can start the story at the climax, cut half-way through, then start all the way back at the beginning, introduce the story, build all the way back up to the rising action, see the climactic moment again, and then the story resolves itself in the descending action. That’s a very popular technique?—?giving the reader or viewer an early glimpse of the story’s “peak” in the beginning, and then leaving them hanging.
Another variation is taking any one of those pieces?—?rising action, climax, and descending action?—?and making them as long or as short as you’d like. You could have a very long rising action, very short climax, and very short descending action. Or you could have a very short rising action, a very long climax, and a very short descending action. But those 3 pieces are what build a story, and any one of them can house the “conflict.”
The conflict is the most important part of a story. Something has to go wrong for the reader or viewer to care. If your Snapchat story is about you going to the grocery store, buying all your fruits and vegetables, checking out, and walking home again, well, that’s pretty boring (sorry). Will some people watch it? Sure. Especially if they just like you, they’ll watch pretty much anything you do?—?and this is what everybody wants. They want to be the lazy influencer who can Snapchat themselves eating a bowl of cereal and have a billion people all respond back with, “OMG UR EATING CEREAL THIS IS AMAZING I LUV U.”
However, if you want to create really great stories, and if you want to become a true influencer, then you need to create content that draws people in and leaves them wanting more.
Let’s re-write that grocery store story.
You wake up and decide, “Ah man, I’m out of groceries.” You start to lace up your shoes?—?and overnight, your dog chewed through one of your laces. “Great,” you say to yourself. “I don’t have extra laces, and this is my only pair of shoes.” Oh no! (the viewers think to themselves…) What are they going to do?
You start walking to the grocery store, one shoe flapping around in the wind because you have no laces. Your viewers laugh?—?ha ha. That’s kind of funny.
You get to the grocery store and, what’s that? Is that your crush? The one you’ve been stalking every day after class/work? You zoom in on them from afar, real creepily, while breathing heavily into the camera. Your audience laughs. What’s going to happen? Are you going to talk to them?
You start walking over into their same aisle. You tell the camera (the audience) you are thinking of openers. What do you say first? “Hey, funny running into you here! So you eat too?” Audience wants to see how this is going to play out?—?probably not well.
Everything up until this moment is what would be called the rising action.
You decide to make the move. You tell your audience you’re going to take the leap and talk to them. (This is the moment right before the climax.)
And then as soon as you take your last step, you fall?—?on your laceless shoe, which brings the reader back to the beginning of the story and creates some element of resolve.
The descending action from here would be the consequences of you falling in front of your crush. Maybe you apologize awkwardly and run out of the grocery store. Maybe you walk home with your shoe still flapping in the wind, confessing how awkward you feel to the camera. But something has to happen after the fact that let your audience know that was the climactic moment and now you’re dealing with the after effects.
If your response to this is, “Well maybe I don’t want to be a comedian!” then please, take a closer look. This structure can be applied to any interest, any industry, any niche or level of thought leadership. Political debates have rising action moments, climactic moments, and descending action moments. So do vulnerable, tear-jerking vlogs. So do public speeches. So do courses teaching people how to do something. How many times have you sat in a course and had the teacher say, “Now, class, what happens when everything goes wrong? What do you do then?”
That’s the moment of conflict.
Every great story and how we communicate with each other as human beings is based around this idea of conflict: “What happens when it all goes to hell?”
In order to become a powerful storyteller on Snapchat, whether you are an influencer or a big brand, you need to start seeing who you are and what you do through the lens of a STORY.
If you are a coach and you want to teach people how to do something, teach them through a story.
If you are a big brand and you want people to pay attention to your products, you need to show them the relevance through telling a story.
Rising action. Climax. Descending action.
Pinpoint the moment of conflict, and then show how it is resolved.
Enjoy this guide? Download the free ebook here for Parts 2, 3, & 4
In the same way a great story follows a structure, the rhythm of an effective story follows a similar structure.
Each Snap you post is a mini story in itself. Even photos you post are “stories” because they capture a moment in time, and that moment has a beginning, middle, and end?—?something came right before the moment of that photo, that photo is capturing the moment, and also leaves people wondering what will happen after the moment captured in that photo.
When you are constructing your Snapchat story, you need to be aware of how your content flows piece by piece. For example: If you record 10 seconds of video that really only captures 2 seconds of engaging content, you are wasting 8 seconds of your audience’s time (and yes, in today’s world 8 seconds is a long time). So then think about how if you post 10 second videos back to back to back. Your audience is going to get really bored, really fast. Nothing is happening fast enough. In an instant, they can swipe out of your story and swipe into someone else’s. You have to give them a reason to keep watching.
A very simple cadence to use when constructing your Snapchat story is 3–6–9. Your first Snap is 3 seconds long, your second is 6, and your third is 9?—?and then you start back over again, next being 3 again, then 6, then 9. This is a very fundamental way of understanding how to create rhythm and cadence throughout your story (which your viewers pay a lot closer attention to than you might think).
Another thing you can do is make all of your photos 1–3 seconds long, your videos 3–6 seconds long, and long moments of explanation 9 seconds long. By cutting your photos shorter, you are forcing your audience to be more engaged so they don’t miss anything.
Snapchat, in many ways, operates very much like a video game. 1 second in a video game is a long time?—?a lot can happen in 1 second. But 1 second in real life is, “Meh.” When you’re creating content, you can’t think of 1 second as “nothing.” You can jam pack a lot into 1 second, and it’s your job as a content creator to use each and every second to its maximum capacity.
In general, always lean toward shorter. If you have a cool photo you want to share, set it to four seconds instead of five, or two seconds instead of three. You always want to leave your audience hanging. The worst thing that could happen is for your audience to press their screen so they move on to your next Snap. Just because that’s an option doesn’t mean it’s a good one. If they are skipping “chapters” (so to speak) then you are filling your story with a lot of unnecessary content. They should open your story and sit there mesmerized by the way your content moves from piece to piece.
The last thing I’d like to note here is that if you are someone who enjoys posting long-winded Snaps of you talking to the camera, please make it engaging. Again, it’s worth reiterating: there is so much content out there to watch. Nobody is “special.” If you want people to pay attention to you, then give them something worth watching. Really worth watching.
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