If your company is not using Snapchat yet, it needs to start doing so NOW. Snapchat is yet another social media tool that you can use to effectively (and easily) market your product, company and/or brand.

What is Snapchat?
Beginning as a classroom creation at Stanford University, the application developed by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy officially launched in April 2011 under the name “Picaboo.” Its purpose: use an app to share pictures that would disappear after someone had looked at them. Now the road to becoming the success story that Snapchat is today wasn’t easy. J.J. Colao explains the full journey in his Forbes article, “The Inside Story of Snapchat: The World’s Hottest App or A $3 Billion Disappearing Act?” Today, Snapchat reaches 11% of the U.S. digital population.

What You Should Know:

CEO: Evan Speigel
Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
Daily Snapchat Videos & Photos Uploads: 800+ million 
Total Number of Snapchat Users: 200 million
Number of Daily Active Users: 100 million

How It Works:
Users download the Snapchat application to their phone, register with a username and begin to search for friends. The application essentially uses your camera to enable users to send and share pictures with these friends; the pictures, however, disappears after the recipient has viewed it. How long one can see the photo depends on the user who sends it.

And, as always, registered users must agree to the company’s Terms of Service.

Users can add photos to Snapchat “stories,” use geotags, filters and paint to add to their photo, and explore live events being covered by other parties. What does all of that mean, exactly? I’ll be breaking it down, step-by-step, in the following posts. For now, just be thinking about the app’s purpose: sharing content through photos and videos (that just happen to disappear after a certain amount of time).