Snapchat has being hailed the next battleground for the millennial dollar, but brands and publishers have been struggling to monetise the social media platform.
However, Popsugar has cracked the code by building an e-commerce app, called Emoticode, that taps into the social action of screenshotting on Snapchat.
The companion app creates and decodes short, emoji-style URLs, to be used on Snapchat and Instagram.
It enables brands and bloggers to include links to products in their Snapchat stories so fans can screenshot it and save it for later. The screenshot is sent to a hub inside the Emoticode or ShopStyle apps. There, the users can then revisit all their screenshots, which link directly to the products for purchase.
Watch the video here on how it works.
Shopstyle head Verity Beard tells AdNews that the app fits seamlessly into the social media platforms, as people are already naturally screenshotting images in the Instagram and Snapchat ecosytem.
Beard says publishers have been trying to tackle how to track the true impact of influencers beyond engagement rates, which she says don't paint the full picture.
"It has previously been hard to measure sales on Snapchat and Instagram, but the app allows us to do that," Beard says.
PopSugar-owned ShopStyle, a platform for thousands of bloggers, will be the first to use these links to monetise its Snapchat content.
ShopStyle launched ShopStyle Collective in Australia earlier this month, with the aim of enabling influencers to monetise from their social followings.
Beard says Emoticode will be used not only by bloggers, but by retailer brands currently working with Popsugar.
The app will be available on the native Emoticode app, the ShopStyle and ShopStyle Collective apps from 3 June, followed by the PopSugar app in the future.
AdNews explored Snapchat’s perfect storm in the last issue. You can read about it here. And did you catch this? Snapchat to open Australian office, hunting local MD.
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