social media

Snap introduces tool to let marketers gauge a topic's popularity

Taking a page from Google Trends, marketers can use the feature to visualize how buzzy a word or phrase is on the app.
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Snap

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Snap debuted a tool on Tuesday that allows marketers to gauge the popularity of a given keyword or topic on its app. It’s called Snapchat Trends, and the similarity to Google Trends in name and functionality probably won’t be lost on marketers—but maybe that’s on purpose.

The platform is positioning it as something marketers can use to look for insights, find creative inspiration, and conduct product and competitive research as they try to reach the app’s 293 million daily active users.

The tool is publicly available, so anyone can visit the site and plug in a keyword (up to five at a time). It then spits out a line graph showing the volume of the keyword’s use in the text of Snapchat Stories over time.

  • As an example, Snap found that the phrase “third wheeling” spikes every weekend, which could be useful intel for, say, dating apps.
  • The tool draws from captions on public and shared Stories, and in some instances shows a set of human-moderated sample Snaps.

Snapchat has gone through a number of evolutions to keep advertisers interested:

  • Last month, it added a “My Places” feature to the Snap Map, giving users an avenue to engage with restaurants and businesses around them.
  • It also introduced a “Campaign Lab” where advertisers can experiment with how they’re running campaigns.
  • And last year, it introduced a competitor to TikTok and Instagram Reels called Spotlight.

Zoom out: According to a blog post, some of Snap’s partners were able to apply insights from its Trends tool through early testing, but a company spokesperson declined to give examples. While the tool is publicly available, the spokesperson told us Snap can take custom requests on a case-by-case basis.—ZS

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