Last month Snap held a virtual 2020 Snap Partner Summit where various announcements were made for the future of the platform. An interesting development is their focus on discovery – aiming to become a one stop shop for finding, and trying, new brands and products.
Here’s a list of the new and upcoming features that brands should take note of:
Places
Visible on the Snap Map, the new Places Profile feature offers additional information on nearby businesses such as reviews, opening hours and options to order. It will be interesting to see how this feature expands, ‘optimising brand SnapMap page’ may become a regular task for social media managers in the near future.
Local Lenses
Snap previewed a new AR feature call Local Lenses, which creates shared AR experiences at a local level. Soon, users will be able to enter virtual spaces together and collaborate on AR art projects. Retail brands could embrace this at a local level, inviting store visitors to add to their virtual guest book.
Scan
Snappers have long been able to scan Snapcodes using the camera to unlock Lenses, but now you can scan…things! Scan will now act as a visual search function and identify 90% of all known plants and trees and nearly 400 dog breeds. Later this year, a nutritional look-up option will be added. This all seems quite novelty right now, but it’s possible in the future that this will expand out into clothing and branded items. Imagine a future where you don’t have to ask that stranger on the street where they got their shoes. Instead you could (subtly) use Scan to find out – and maybe even be directly linked to the store to buy them.
Lens Voice Scan
Without going into too much detail, Snap also previewed a voice-search element to the Scan feature. The example was the speaker asking Snapchat to turn her hair pink, with it automatically applying the Lens.
SnapMinis
An interesting announcement at the developer conference, Snap Minis are apps that can be built within Snapchat so that friends can interact with shared experiences. One of the first will be with Headspace, where Snapchat users will be able to send encouraging messages to friends and do quick meditations. Other Minis included cinema booking apps and festival line-up planners. It appears that Snapchat is moving to become more like Weibo – a one-stop social app where users can book a taxi or order food in the same space.
A whole host of other new developer and content features were also announced, if you want to check them out, Snap has them listed here.
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