I have a confession. I am utterly enthralled obsessed with Snapchat – a text, photo and video messaging app that allows users to send content to their friends that will disappear after one to ten seconds. As of August last year, it was ranked the third most popular social app amongst millennials, right behind Facebook and Instagram.

With over a 100 million global active users every month who share 400 million snaps every day, this fairly young app (four years old!) holds the key to an enormous database. More than 71% of all Snapchat users are under 25 and roughly 70% of all these users are female.

Earlier this year, it was reported that the company was looking to raise an additional round of funding (roughly $500 million) that would value the company at $19 billion, making it the third most valuable tech start up. In a bid to appeal to advertisers, in January it launched a separate feature known as Snapchat Discover.

 What is Discover?

According to a statement by Snapchat, Discover is a new way to explore stories from different editorial teams. It’s the result of a collaboration with world-class leaders in media to build a storytelling format that puts the narrative first.

 Discover essentially provides media companies a platform to post summarised versions of their content that disappears after 24 hours. So far, the following brands have jumped on board;-CNN, Comedy Central, Cosmopolitan, Daily Mail, ESPN, Food Network, National Geographic, People, Vice, Yahoo! News and Warner Music Group.  A few days ago, Madonna premiered her new music video through Discover.

What does this mean for brands?

Opportunities for users to engage with high quality content

Regardless of whether users follow these brands on other social channels, Discover is a platform that allows people to literally ‘discover’ high quality content within a fairly uncluttered market place. As this medium is fairly new, brands are forced to come up with innovative and creative ways to grab and retain their audience’s attention. Last year during the Superbowl, Audi teamed up with satirical giant The Onion to come up with a series of lighthearted snaps. Check them out here.

Currently on Discover, Cosmopolitan, for example, posts teaser videos followed by a series of short articles (see below) and Nat Geo posts a series of previews for its documentaries. Some other brands post content that links out to external sites. As the content is presented for a period of 24 hours, opportunities arise for audiences to go back and re-engage with that particular piece of content.

Ability to reach a wider audience. Instantly

Katy Leim in Marketing Land piece articulates why this platform is a perfect medium to access a global audience; 

”Everyone wants a piece of the younger, tech-savvy millennial audience. Now, thanks to Discover, established publishers and big brands – many with gradually aging audiences – have a unique opportunity to build credibility and loyalty with them in a contextually relevant way.”

 As this is such a fairly new medium for content creation and distribution, I cannot wait to see how brands in the future make best use of this app!