Dive Brief:
- The Huffington Post has created a Snapchat button for its website to drive visitors to follow the publisher on the social media app, according to Digiday.
- The button pulls up an image of the Huffington Post’s Snapchat code, which website visitors can then scan with their phones to follow the publisher on the app, according Kiki Von Glinow, director of growth at Huffington Post.
- The Huffington Post has seen a 140% lift in daily average signups after launching its version of the Snapchat button.
Dive Insight:
Snapchat is rare among social media platforms for not making it easy for publishers and marketers to drive traffic from their websites to content on the app.
“Snapchat is not the easiest platform to surface content on," Von Glinow told Digiday. "We have to tell the user coming to us on desktop that they can experience HuffPo in a completely different way on Snapchat.”
A social media darling since launch, Snapchat appears to have finally arrived as a top-tier social media platform, recently surpassing Twitter in average daily users and boasting as many (or more) daily video views than Facebook at around 10 billion. The video-sharing platform's user base is still a fraction of Facebook's, but the recent addition of its ad partner program and automated API stand to make advertising on the app easier and legitimize its new standing in the social media universe.
When the app first launched, Snapchat's attitude toward marketers seemed ambivalent at best. But lately, Snapchat has been actively seeking to improve these relationships by improving targeting and measurement for in-app advertising and offering an ad partner program. At the same, Snapchat still charges high rates for ads, such as a minimum of $40 CPM for interactive video ads, even if no one actually engages with the interactive aspect of the ad.