20 February 2017
Lex Blog report the following today ……
Law firms using Snapchat for publishing commentary and engaging their audience. Sounds a little crazy, but so did law firms using Twitter for sharing news in 140 characters just five years ago.
Snapchat, an image messaging and multimedia mobile application launched just five years ago, is going public within the next month with a valuation of close to $20 billion. A lot of people in the investment community believe Snapchat is here to stay and that the number of users, now 160 million, and revenue are only going to grow.
I’ll confess. Though I have a Snapchat account, I have never used it.
But when Ken Doctor at Newsonomics reports that the New York Times is going to devote a half dozen staffers to publishing a daily Snapchat edition, it makes me think that there’s a publishing opportunity that awaits us in Snapchat.
The Times is not alone, the Washington Post shared last week that it will be the breaking news source on Snapchat’s “Discover.”
CNN which has been using Snapchat for a couple years, publishes a mix of content, per Digiday, including international stories, entertainment news and political coverage — in text and video form. It has also experimented with creating Snapchat-exclusive interactives, such as one it made about the Supreme Court.
Snapchat is seen to represent a new direction in social media, with its users wanting a more in-the-moment way of sharing and communicating. With less emphasis on an accumulation of ongoing status leaving permanent material, Snapchat focuses on fleeting encounters.
Messaging apps with these characteristics surpassed social networks in unique digital audience within the last year, per Doctor, and Snapchat takes advantage of this trend. Snapchat, a mobile app company also takes advantage of the growing mobile networking phenomenon.
How do users communicate or publish on Snapchat?
By creating multimedia messages referred to as “snaps,” consisting of a photo or a short video, which can be edited to include filters and effects, text captions and drawings.
Snapchat “publishes” content via “Stories” and “Discovers.” Stories allow a user at a specific event to contribute “snaps” to a curated story promoted to all users.
http://kevin.lexblog.com/2017/02/19/snapchat-lawyers-really-happening/
