I got 46,843 views of my SnapChat Filter for just £10.82

Did you know that you can now create your own on-demand Snapchat geofilters for as little as $5? That’s right you can use Snapchat for something other than selfies!

Whilst there are some community geofilters around, mostly promoting cities, you can now create your own, and it’s really easy and can get you great awareness for a small price.

Summer Ball Geofilter

I created a geofilter for the Summer Ball at the University I work at and thought it’d be useful to share some of the stats and show how impressive the results were.

Time Span: 21 hours (8am-5am)

Area: around 160,000 square feet

Cost: $15.65 (£10.82 at the time)

Uses: 509 (around 20 were from our offical @christchurchsu SnapChat account)

Views: 46,843 (Very impressive indeed! On average each Snap use generated 100 views.)

Here’s the data below:

SnapChat Stats
It was amazingly simple and involved submitting a design, selecting the timeframe, and then dragging a ‘fence’ border on a map to outline the boundaries.

Snapchat provide editable photoshop files which give a good guidance on use and submissions have to be manually approved but ours only took around 12 hours.

How to promote your filter

Once you’ve set your geofilter up then Snapchat users in your specified area will be able to find it by swiping through their filters but it’s worth doing some active promotion if you can to alert people to it. We promoted the geofilter on flyers on entry to the Summer Ball (which also featured the Summer Ball map and line-up times) so people knew we had it and I’d like to think that will have encouraged occasional Snapchatters to use it.

Don’t forget to use the geofilter yourself as this will raise awareness of it and in this instance we used it for behind the scenes promo of the Summer Ball throughout the day of the Ball.

Brand Awareness

It strikes me that this is a great way to enhance brand awareness.  You can’t put usernames, phone numbers links etc in the design but can still use your logo or a message.

It’s worth noting that costs will vary depending on times and locations, so a filter for New Years Eve in Central London will cost lots more. There are also some instances where you won’t be allowed to run geofilters or hijack events such as the Oscars:

It’s also possible that some of these events may not be available for on-demand geofilter campaigns. Snapchat won’t allow on-demand geofilters to appear in areas where Live Stories — which can include ads — are running or where brands are running a chain of Sponsored Geofilter campaigns in multiple locations (like McDonald’s restaurants), and the company may restrict them around high-traffic areas and events, according to the Snapchat spokesman. – Marketingland.com

How could you use geofilters?

The main thing you need to consider is whether there will be people using Snapchat in your geofenced area, and whether they would actually want to use your filter. It worked for me at the Summer Ball as the majority of the 1500 people who attended were aged 18-21, and if they were using Snapchat on the night then the filter would give them the ideal opportunity to show off that they were here. We weren’t trying to sell anything, just increase brand awareness of the Summer Ball.

Geofilters are also time-sensitive and it probably wouldn’t be viable to run them 24/7 so think about opportunities when a filter would work, and when you would have a captive audience.

Snapchat-Geofilters

We are considering using them for the start of the new academic year at University for the arrivals weekend and creating geofilters at all the student accommodation building for that particular weekend. I say considering as we may need to do some testing first. The geofilters require GPS location on your mobile phone, and as some of the halls of residences are large multistory concrete buildings it may be that the geofilters won’t actually work due to poor signal. We shall see.

If you have a business perhaps you could run a geofilter and run a promo to give a discount to those who use it? All your customers need to do is add the Snapchat to their story (which is online for 24 hours) and show it to you. Not only is it proof they used it but all their friends will be able to see this to SnapChat too so great promo.

If you’re at a tradeshow or conference why not ‘hijack’ it and promote yourself or your business? It’s worth thinking whether it’s the type of place where people will be Snapchatting, but if it’ around ‘digital’ or ‘youth’ then it could be worth doing.

Music gigs could also be an option too, as you can’t avoid people taking photos and videos there, so why not Snapchat?

I’m sure there’s plenty of other uses so please share in the comments below.

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