A Snapchat Geofilter created by the Sun City Music Festival for their 2015 attendees.[/caption]
Empower your fans on Snapchat
Last year I asked the question: “Do you NEED to be on Snapchat?”
Like most things in the music industry, the answer differs depending on your genre, age, and audience (to say nothing of your interest in hopping onto yet another social platform).
But if you’re curious what you can do with Snapchat as a musician, check out this article.
Snapchat Geofilters for musicians, venues, and festivals
For artists who’re already promoting themselves on Snapchat, you should check out the platform’s On-Demand Geofilters options — which are now available to all users. For a small fee, you can create a location-based filter (for instance, the venue for your next show) that can be added to snaps by anyone in the selected area.
In his recent article for Digital Music News about Snapchat Geofilters, Ari Herstand says:
I go out and see music multiple times a week and I usually Snap a few seconds of the show. Occasionally I forget to write on my video who the artist is and I get direct Snaps from my followers asking me to identify the artist. However, if there was an attractive filter with the artist’s name accessible by simply swiping right, I’d add it every time.
And now it’s possible.
For as low as $5 for an 8 hour window of time spanning 20,000 sq feet (about half a city block), you can create a custom geofilter that’s available for every Snapchatter in the designated area.
This is especially useful for mid – high level acts playing theaters, amphitheaters and arenas. As a test, I created an Alabama Shakes geofilter for The Greek Theater in LA for their back to back August dates. It cost only about $35 for two days. Not bad considering that could potentially be thousands of branded Snaps sent out at once (viewed by tens of thousands of other Snapchatters). From an advertiser’s standpoint, this is a goldmine.
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If a lot of your audience is already on Snapchat, you should create a geofilter for your next big show or festival date. Be sure to tell them from the stage that they can add the filter to their snaps, which makes it easy for them to share the concert experience with their friends.
Here’s how it works, according to Snapchat:
Design — Use your favorite image editor to create a filter. We’ve also provided some templates that are compatible with Photoshop and Illustrator to get you started 🙂
Map — Pick a geofence where your filter will appear, then choose the time and dates you want your Geofilter to be available.
Buy — Submit your Geofilter. Our team will quickly review it and, assuming all is well, get it up and running.
You can buy On-Demand Geofilters for an event or even an entire block — for an hour or up to thirty days! Pricing starts at $5, and depends on a few factors including, among others, the size of your geofence and the time period you’ve chosen. On-Demand Geofilters are available now in the US, UK, and Canada, with more locations coming soon!
Get started at https://www.snapchat.com/on-demand!
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To see it in action, in a totally NON-musical context, here’s Snapchat’s promo video for the geofilter tool — featuring a birthday girl who wants her friends to be able to share snaps from her party that are customized with her birthday filter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZjEeEez_0
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Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.