What began as a class project at Stanford University has, in barely 6 years of business, grown into one of the internet's most dominant social media platforms.

By any measure a strange concept on the surface - communicating socially via manipulated images and videos which disappear forever 10 seconds after they are sent - Snapchat has been widely embraced among a new generation of internet users. The first generation raised in a digital, social media, and social sharing world, wary of (and well informed about about) the unintended consequences of living life online.

Snapchat's ability to circumvent traditional social media pitfalls and uncanny instinct for delivering just the right mix of applications and tools to hold the interest of today's fickle social media user have translated into massive financial success and seemingly limitless future earning potential. This potential has been obvious to those in the know for quite some time- Facebook famously tried unsuccessfully to purchase Snapchat for $3 billion in 2014.

As traditional social media behemoths like Twitter have begun to watch their user numbers stagnate, and as the parents of the millennials and generation z have torn Facebook's cool factor to shreds, the "new social media" has lumbered clumsily to the forefront of youth digital culture.

"Millennials" and "Generation Z", demographics notoriously difficult for brands to reach in any meaningful way (perhaps more so than any generation previous), have flocked in huge numbers away from traditional social media sites and toward Snapchat, creating a unique marketing opportunity that has may brands foaming at the mouths in their frenzy to exploit it. 

But all is not well in Snapchat town. 

As many of the site's social media forebears have learned the hard way, monetising such an audience is often much easier said than done... 

A Snapchat Snapshot: A look inside one of social media’s superstars

The Snapchat legend goes that When Evan Spiegel presented his concept (then known as “Picaboo”) to his class at Stanford in April, 2011, the idea was roundly dismissed as having no legs. “Why”, they asked, “would anyone possibly want to post a photo or video online, only to have it disappear into the digital ether mere seconds later?”

A valid question, to be sure.

As it turned out, the answer was: Because teenagers, that’s why.

Luckily for Spiegel, he opted to ignore the protests of his classmates and push on with his project anyway, launching in September of 2011. Within it’s first year online, Snapchat had hit 10 million users.

Almost all of them were teenagers.

Why? Because their moms were on Facebook and Twitter (who wants to be seen in public with their mom?) and could see everything they did or said on those platforms. A platform that moms didn’t understand, and where temporary posts meant that everything they posted was (to a certain extent) secret, held almost universal appeal among the teenage demographic.

***Note: if you got the above reference, you probably don’t have a Snapchat account***

As things tend to do in the world of teenagers, Snapchat spread quickly. By 2014, 40% of 18 year-olds in the US reported using Snapchat daily. But it was with the introduction of “Lenses” that really made the site go nuclear.

Snapchat lenses allowed users to take selfies (a huge trend at the time) and add amusing visual effects to them.

You could be a dog…

Or vomit a rainbow…

Or..whatever…

When filtered Snapchat images from celebrities and regular folks alike began popping up across the internet, everyone suddenly wanted to know how to take some for themselves. By December of that year, Snapchat had reached over 100 million users, and Facebook’s $3 billion bid from just 2 years previous looked like a bag of magic beans.

As Snapchat’s user metrics continued to grow more impressive by the day, and as investment capital continued to pour in (by 2015, Snapchat had raised $648 million from investors), the question of how best to monetise the site’s audience became one which needed to be answered sooner rather than later.

In June of 2015, McDonald’s developed Snapchat’s first paid geofilter advertising campaign, involving Branded geofilters available at all McDonald’s locations in the US.

In Spetember of 2016, Snapchat rebranded as Snap Inc

Also in 2016, Snap Inc identified a monetisation loophole missed by previous social media networks back in their own peak-cool periods, selling it’s own branded merchandise. The company announced the release of “Spectacles” functional sunglasses which record 10 second videos, then automatically sinc the resulting footage to the wearer’s phone.

With more than 150 million daily active users by the end of 2016 (eclipsing Twitter’s daily active user count by a full 10 million), Snap Inc. with its unparalleled brand power in the social media space, may find that it is onto a winner in marketing its own goods.

Social media audiences, however, are fickle at best. In no demographic is this more true than when dealing with the teenage and early-twenties crowd. How long Snapchat can remain cool in a marketplace changing and growing more crowded by the day is anyone’s guess. In the current climate, the idea that such an approach to social site monetisation can possibly have longevity appears dubious at best, not to mention the associated logistical problems attempting to move fully into the manufacturing and retail space would undoubtedly create.

Much more realistic is the idea that Snap Inc. and those who wish to market to its audience, will be the first to solve the social media marketing ROI puzzle without alienating and annoying its user base.

To do this will require some outside-the-box thinking and no small amount of innovation. Third party products like Adimo identified issues with exisitng online purchase journey processes some time ago and have been developing new approaches to help companies optimise their presence on social media sites like Snapchat. Sadly, most companies have moved slowly to adapt and implement such applications, resulting in largely poor ROI numbers across the social media marketing industry as a whole.

It behooves Snap Inc, and those wishing to market to market on Snap Inc’s platform, to do some social media marketing strategy soul searching and begin to ask themselves some tough questions about what is working, what isn’t working currently, and why that might be the case.

There are brands which are not only existing, but very much thriving in the Snapchat space.

Gatorade developed its own branded filter:

Indeed, for a company like Snap Inc, and the audience who loves it, the old ways of approaching monetisation, marketing, and advertising probably won’t drive the kinds of results companies are hoping for.

It is only the truly forward thinking who can make the most of what looks to be an unprecedented marketing opportunity with a notoriously hard to reach audience.

Whether the marketing world (and Snap Inc themselves) will wake up to this fact and make the most of this opportunity before young social media audiences move on to the next shiny new toy is a question for which most of us have to wait to see answered.