Snapchat is upping its game

Last month Snap held a virtual 2020 Snap Partner Summit where various announcements were made for the future of the platform. An interesting development is their focus on discovery – aiming to become a one stop shop for finding, and trying, new brands and products.

Here’s a list of the new and upcoming features that brands
should take note of:

Places

Visible on the Snap Map, the new Places Profile feature
offers additional information on nearby businesses such as reviews, opening
hours and options to order. It will be interesting to see how this feature expands,
‘optimising brand SnapMap page’ may become a regular task for social media
managers in the near future.

Local Lenses

Snap previewed a new AR feature call Local Lenses, which
creates shared AR experiences at a local level. Soon, users will be able to
enter virtual spaces together and collaborate on AR art projects. Retail brands
could embrace this at a local level, inviting store visitors to add to their
virtual guest book.

Scan

Snappers have long been able to scan Snapcodes using the
camera to unlock Lenses, but now you can scan…things! Scan will now act as a
visual search function and identify 90% of all known plants and trees and
nearly 400 dog breeds. Later this year, a nutritional look-up option will be
added. This all seems quite novelty right now, but it’s possible in the future
that this will expand out into clothing and branded items. Imagine a future
where you don’t have to ask that stranger on the street where they got their
shoes. Instead you could (subtly) use Scan to find out – and maybe even be
directly linked to the store to buy them.

Lens Voice Scan

Without going into too much detail, Snap also previewed a
voice-search element to the Scan feature. The example was the speaker asking
Snapchat to turn her hair pink, with it automatically applying the Lens.

SnapMinis

An interesting announcement at the developer conference,
Snap Minis are apps that can be built within Snapchat so that friends can
interact with shared experiences. One of the first will be with Headspace,
where Snapchat users will be able to send encouraging messages to friends and
do quick meditations. Other Minis included cinema booking apps and festival line-up
planners. It appears that Snapchat is moving to become more like Weibo – a
one-stop social app where users can book a taxi or order food in the same
space.

A whole host of other new developer and content features
were also announced, if you want to check them out, Snap has them listed here.

If you’re interested in adding Snapchat into your social
strategy, our team
of specialists can help. Get in
touch.