Now I’ve heard Marketing peeps being compared with Drug Dealers and Pirates before. But now, Pornstars. Oh they do get about.

Snapchat is a image messaging service that allows you to easily talk to friends. But more importately, get your message accross, build a network and grow your business.

I’m a 20 year old Social Media Strategist working with some of the biggest and most established events and brands. I’m also recently single and grown up around new technology. You can see where this is going, right?

Now both Marketers and Pornstars both want to build an audience, a community, share aspects of their life/business in return for profit or sucess.

One thing that astonished me when speaking at an event in London last month, was the sheer amount of people not on Snapchat in this industry. It’s an amazing tool to help grow your brand awareness and interact with customers and clients.

Pornstars 1–0

Marketers A missed oppertunity in my opinion is the power of takeovers. Pornstars do it daily. They take over accounts for an hour or two, sometimes the entire days. The owner of the snapchat account (usually a brand) gains content from the ‘talent’ (ew), and inturn the ‘talent’ (ew again) gains followers which they can use to build an audience or community and leverage from this to equal profit from selling videos, or their ‘premium’ account (Not going to explain. It’s more out there. Or should I say ‘in there’).

I feel that soon enough, Brands and Marketers will be using this similar model. Here’s an example: Imagine if a Hot Startup founder took over Forbes or Entrepreneur’s snapchat account for a day. Imagine the benefits it could bring both parties…

• The brand would get content in which they could create a blog around, put together the story and share on social and provide value to their audience. You see the struggle & the hustle that goes into being a Startup founder.
• The founder would get to share his story with a large audience that Forbes or Enreuprenuner has built up and in turn ask them to follow his story further by asking the audience to add him on Snapchat. With this increased brand awareness and a following, it could generate hype around the product/service, or even bring him that key Investor needed to take it from here to there.

But Wait?

This isn’t new. YouTubers have been doing this for years. Everyones favourite happy-go-lucky british girl, Zoella is a prime example. With over 10 million subscribers on youtube, 700M+ video views and 4.5M+ followers on twitter, she’s becoming a household name.

This fairly normal girl from Wiltshire, turned Beauty Empire. Is something that brands could only dream of. She’s a best-selling author (twice-over), owns her own Beauty range, and could sell out any venue offered to her within a heartbeat due to her army of fans that follow her every move.

She, along with her YouTuber friends have harnessed the power of ‘Collaborations’. On her channel she regularly makes videos with her boyfriend, brother, Celebrities and just about anyone who would bring her a larger audience for that matter.

It’s the exact same format, modelled for a different platform, Snapchat.

If I were in a Marketing position for a brand, or a founder of a startup, I’d be exploring this oppertunity on how do I grow my presence on Snapchat by being exposed to other people/brands audiences.