This week in class, I learned about how Snapchat is being used by companies as the greatest new tool for storytelling. Despite being an avid Snapchat user over the past 2 years, I realized that I had never learned how to subscribe to an actual organization, company, or public figure to see their daily updates using this platform. Tonight, I decided to check out some companies to see how they used Snapchat for their business. I found some of the more mainstream ones like Amazon, Sour Patch Kids, and Masahble, but the Snapchat organization called “Crafty” caught my eye and captivated me for a solid several minutes. Crafty is described as the “Ultimate in DIY, Arts & Crafts, and Home Decor” and it definitely feels that way. I couldn’t stop watching as Crafty showed me all these incredible ways to make cool, colorful soaps that looked like letters, watermelon slices, and other fruits. When the stories were over, it left me wondering what I would see tomorrow. I see videos like this on Facebook and other social media platforms, but what I loved about seeing it on Snapchat was how each story rolled seamlessly into the next and I couldn’t stop watching.
What I love about Crafty is that they use so much color in their videos and they seem to have so many cool, creative things to show from one day to the next. However, something was definitely missing from their stories. I decided to pause my writing process and go check my social media accounts. When I did, a light bulb went off in my head when I was scrolling my Instagram newsfeed and saw a new post from the organization called Snoopslimes that I recently followed. I realized that Crafty is missing a personality. In the DIY soap stories of theirs that I just watched, all I see are hands, so it’s hard to connect with Crafty’s snaps as a “story” and not just an instructional video that’s cute and interesting but a little hollow.
In fact, I think Crafty could learn something pretty important from the Instagram user called Snoopslimes. 
Snoopslimes does both a daily Instagram story and a daily posts to their static page. They have 1.8 million followers and are very active on Instagram in similar ways to Snapchat users. While Snoopslimes also lacks a face to their organization like Crafty since it only shows a woman’s hands, Snoopslimes still always does a really great job of creating stories and viewer-interaction by including questions in the posts to get a dialogue going. Additionally, they seem to be very real with their audience, like how they state in the post descriptions when a video was particularly fun to film or apologize for a repost due to a technical issues, (which is something many Instagram users can relate to). So despite their lacking an actual face for their organization, Snoopslimes makes up for it by showing personality and authenticity in their lively descriptions. Crafty’s Snapchat stories were beautiful and inspiring, but they lacked that magical extra factor that Snoopslimes shows by making us feel like there is a real person behind the video and that our feedback matters to what they do. Simply put, Crafty is impersonal and Snoopslimes is our friend.
Snapchat has really grown over the last 4 years and is breaking the stigma that it is just a silly app for high schools to use to send lewd photos. In fact, Snapchat is a great tool now for distributing editorial content, such as political articles/news, fashion, and any topic of interest you can imagine. It’s also great because it can give a company access into a younger demographic that they may not have been previously able to reach. While Instagram and Facebook have implemented the Stories feature now too, Snapchat was the pioneer of this storytelling format and it continues to be the platform I go to daily to post photos and videos of little snapshots from my life and watch my friends’ stories as they travel the world, go on hilarious rants, or update me on their various whereabouts. Now that I know more about this feature for organizations on Snapchat, I will be sure to keep an eye out to see how Snapchat develops its powerful niche in the social media world. I hope to see organizations like Snoopslimes get a Snapchat account in addition to their Instagram since I’d be interested to see how they can use it in different ways to interact with their fans. There are merits to many of these new and popular platforms of storytelling, but the most fun part of it all is seeing how each platform develops its own unique purpose as users flock to different platforms for specialized kinds of information and story sharing.
VITAMINPEE 