Your band has a show coming up. You’ve become one with the glow of the phone screen and even look forward to seeing what fans share on social media. They are snapchatting away! But who wants to spend time adding text to a snap. You have to click the button, type the text, choose the format, position it, maybe even change the color. Exhausting! Text isn’t fast. You know what are fast? Filters.
“But… those are for brands! Big companies! The only custom filters I see are for Michael Bay’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Summer Blockbuster Explosionapalooza!”
What if I told you that filters were for everybody? Not only can anyone set one up, but they can be affordable for any campaign, too.
A Snapchat filter is a quickly-accessed layover image for a snap. After taking a photo or video, a user can swipe through various options. There are photo filters à la Instagram, time, temperature and speed icons, and geofilters. Snapchat Geofilters are limited by location and/or time. Here at The Orchard HQ in NYC, I can always add a city filter or a neighborhood filter (NoHo). If I walk just a few blocks down the street, I lose the NoHo filter but can access the SoHo filter instead. There might also be a time of day filter (“Rise and Grind NYC” on weekday mornings) or a holiday one (the Memorial Day filter was not accessible by those outside of the U.S.).
And yes, you can setup your own geofilter, too! First, create art for your filter via Snapchat’s template. Make sure to leave a good amount of negative space — you want to highlight fan content, not cover it up. Once your art is ready, you can setup a new filter by choosing a location and runtime. Locations are determined by dragging and dropping your borders on a map, so feel free to get as specific as possible. Your territory must be at least 20,000 sq. ft. The larger the area and longer the run time, the higher the cost of the filter.
The best parts? You’ll give fans one-swipe access to branding their snaps around your artist at their shows. They’ll love the photo-enhancement and you’ll love the awareness a filter can build. Filters start at only $5 and you’ll get metrics back like uses and views.
