Snapchat brings Stories to other apps

Brief:

Snap introduced a way for developers to show Snapchat Stories in their own apps. By integrating with App Stories, developers can let their users post vanishing messages from Snapchat and drive engagement on their respective platforms, per an announcement shared with Mobile Marketer.
Social video app Triller, video messaging app Squad, online dating app Hily and social augmented reality (AR) app Octi are the first apps to integrate their platforms with App Stories. The feature is part of Snap Kit, the company's collection of developer tools to help third parties integrate their services with Snapchat.
For Snapchat users, App Stories lets them seamlessly share their disappearing messages in other apps. Users also can share Stories in other apps without posting them to Snapchat, per its announcement. Instead of vanishing after 24 hours, Stories that appear in other apps have a default setting to disappear after seven days, TechCrunch reported.

Insight:

Snap's App Stories developer tool has several implications for mobile marketers, including those that have their own apps or buy advertising on Snapchat. For marketers with their own apps, App Stories lets them add a Stories feature without having to build one from scratch. That can help to keep their customers in their own apps while displaying content that people create with Snapchat's camera and photo-editing tools. The integration also can help to drive traffic from Snapchat, which had 218 million users as of the end of last year. For marketers that buy ads on Snapchat, Snap currently doesn't have ad placements in Stories that users share in other apps, but plans to do so, TechCrunch reported.

Snap announced the App Stories feature last year when the company hosted its first developer summit. The company in the past few years has made a stronger effort to embrace the developer community, creators and social influencers whose work appears in rival content-sharing platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, all of which have copied the Stories feature that Snapchat pioneered. By creating more software tools, Snap aims to build a more cohesive ecosystem that makes its platform more vital to marketers, developers and consumers while fending off competitors.

Within those efforts, Snap last month introduced Lens Web Builder, touting it as the first web-based AR Lens production tool, to help marketers create AR ads for Snapchat. The tool doesn't require specialized technical expertise to create professional-looking content, and has hundreds of templates and thousands of 3D objects and animations to help marketers create AR experiences quickly.

Similar to the new App Stories tool, Snap this year began a pilot program for the Snap Audience Network that lets brands place Snapchat ads on other apps. Last fall, the company introduced its Creative Kit for Web to let brands and publishers share web content on the social media app.