Marketers aiming to attract a millennial audience need to implement and actively engage with social media messaging apps to reach this active yet time-poor target audience. Millennials are those aged between 18 and 35 who have grown up as digital natives where they access technology at the touch of a button. Their time-poor nature means visual communications and particularly video is the format that can capture their attention quickly and effectively.
Video has become the single most important online format. According to Cisco it is predicted to account for 80% of all global consumer internet traffic in 2019. As a result, marketers have to constantly look at ways at integrating video into their social media marketing mix to keep up with the pace of technology.
Snapchat, with its 150 million daily users, was the original purveyor of 10 second videos via its Snapchat Stories feature with its followers spending 25 to 30 minutes per day on the app. Instagram has only recently introduced a similar feature (also called Stories) but has a much larger user base with 300 million daily users.
Snapchat Stories has much better filters allowing for a deeper level of customisation. For marketers, this means that the content created can be more in line with the brand and what brand story they wish to tell. Instagram Stories has a much wider capacity for scale with 500 million monthly users so brands can cast a much wider net.
For now, marketers need to decide which is more important to them; customisation of content, or audience scale, when choosing either tool. For an illustrated look at the similarities and differences between both, see the below visual asset produced by One Productions.
By Robert Allen
Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.
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