How to Get Your First 1,000 Snapchat Followers in 30 Days

Source: Neil Patel

Snapchat is the red-headed stepchild that everybody loves to pick on. The platform that everyone loves to hate.

But the truth is, Snapchat is an invaluable tool for growing just about any business or personal brand.

It’s the cornerstone of candid, natural content creation in the real world.

And trust me, that content type is seriously lacking.

While Instagram is awesome for showcasing products and edited “best versions,” Snapchat kills it at being completely natural.

And it doesn’t hurt that 178 million people are active on that platform every single day, let alone their total monthly active users.

Snapchat users spend an average of 30+ minutes on the app daily, opening it more than 25 times in a single day.

That engagement is almost unheard of.

The social platform may take a bunch of heat from critics who compare it to Instagram’s astonishing 800 million monthly active users, but they’re dead wrong.

And while the two platforms may be similar, they can be used in dramatically different ways.

Snapchat isn’t Instagram, and Instagram isn’t Snapchat.

Here’s how to leverage Snapchat for business and personal branding to get your first 1,000 followers in 30 days.

Invite contacts & share your QR code on social and email.

The first step in gaining easy followers on Snapchat is leveraging your existing contacts and connections.

These will be the easiest followers you can get because chances are, they know you and will follow you back instantly.

Since Snapchat connects to your phone, you can easily allow it to access your contacts and social media platforms.

That means you can instantly add selected contacts or Facebook friends with just a few clicks.

When starting up your Snapchat, head to your profile and click on the “Add Friends” button:

From here, select the “Contacts” menu and click “Find Friends” to allow Snapchat access to your contacts and social profiles.

Then navigate back to “Add Friends.” In this section, Snapchat will have a long, curated list of everyone you can add with one tap.

Now just sit back, relax and wait for your friends and family to follow you back.

With this simple move, you should be able to secure a decent amount of followers to get the ball rolling.

Next, you can use the existing followers you have on any other social platforms to spread awareness of your new Snapchat profile.

One of my favorite examples of this technique being perfected is from Gary Vaynerchuk. On his Twitter, he’s amassed over 1.6 million followers.

And while that amount of followers and traction won’t be the case for you and me, other social platforms that you have are perfect places to promote a new one.

Why? Because people don’t just use one social platform. They use multiple.

Chances are, your followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram use Snapchat. Maybe not all of them, but some of them surely do.

To take advantage of this, Gary Vee promotes his Snapchat account using his unique QR code and direct instructions:

With Snapchat, you can generate a unique QR code that is shareable to anyone you send it to.

This makes it extremely easy for users to follow you. All they have to do is save the image, open Snapchat and import the picture.

To find your own Snapchat QR code, head to your profile on the mobile app and click on your profile name and image:

This will bring up a menu of three choices:

First, you can either share your Snapcode directly from your profile via email, text or social media.

But, for this step, I personally recommend that you simply save your Snapcode to your camera roll.

Let me explain why:

If users are newer to Snapchat, they might not know how to add you via the QR code function.

That’s why Gary Vee used instructions on his Twitter post about Snapchat:

To make the process easy and ensuring he gets the maximum carry-over of followers from each social platform that he shared the graphic on.

So for this step, select “Save Snapcode to Camera Roll.”

One of my favorite tools for creating fast graphics is Canva. Taking that newly created Snapcode from your camera roll, you can import it directly into Canva and create a graphic for social media.

Let me show you how:

First, fire up Canva and select the generic “Social Graphic” template.

In the image editor, head to the “Uploads” section and upload the Snapcode that you downloaded previously:

You can then choose from pre-made Canva templates for a design that fits your branding.

If you don’t want a pre-made template, you can always edit your own using more uploaded content or background colors:

In just a few minutes of editing and tweaking, I created this simple graphic to post on social channels that will drive tons of easy follows:

When creating your graphic, be sure to include simple instructions to reduce any potential friction by adding you.

Now take your graphic and spread it on your most active social channels.

Once you’ve done that, you can move onto your email list as a secondary way to drive social follows.

The key here is to provide incentives to following your Snapchat. You have to make it worthwhile for users.

If you don’t incentivize, you likely won’t get follows. Why? Because the offer has to be mutually beneficial.

If you are focusing on personal branding, can you offer them free content or a coupon for your online course?

If you sell products, can you offer them a 5-10% discount?

You get the point:

Use discounts, coupons or content to reward your loyal fans for following your Snapchat account.

Let’s recap your steps to get you tons of followers fast:

1. Invite your contacts: this is an easy win. A quick way to get potentially hundreds of followers.
2. Share your QR code: using Canva, craft a beautiful graphic with your Snapcode and use it on social media to spread the news.
3. Email your subscribers: using that same graphic, email your subscribers with an incentive to bring in loyal followers who will buy from you.

Use Bitmoji and Augmented Reality to create viral content

Snapchat is a highly engaged platform. People spend a ton of time on the app daily. While that’s a great opportunity to capture attention, it also poses some serious challenges:

• Saturation: thousands of companies and brands use Snapchat, posting daily with excellent content. Topics have been covered from end to end, making viral content hard to create.
• Competition: With so many brands using Snapchat, getting attention is harder than ever, despite engagement being through the roof.

Luckily, Snapchat has a few tools up their sleeves that have shown serious potential for crafting viral content, even if your brand isn’t well-known.

Bitmoji is a key addition to Snapchat that has become a cornerstone of content.

Bitmoji allows you to customize a virtual avatar that looks exactly like you.

It can be used on your Snapcode, in actual snaps and photos and even messaging across Snapchat or other social platforms.

In 2016, Snapchat acquired Bitmoji’s parent company, Bitstrips, for nearly $70 million.

Bitmoji consistently ranks as a top application on mobile stores for iPhone and Android.

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