“If there are enough people snapping from a farmers' market or a festival or a community event or fundraiser, it will really get your content out to new eyeballs,” she says. “I think it’s a fantastic way to connect with people.”Īnd it also can be a great tool to promote events as they are happening. “I was able to see friends there that I didn’t even know were attending,” she says.

She was at an industry conference when Snap Map was rolled out. It’s Great for Event Promotionįor Gillentine, the feature had an immediate impact.

Limas and Gillentine, who will speak about Snapchat at the upcoming Big 4 Social Media Summit, August 9-10, in San Francisco, offered a few early takeaways. The new feature has caused some significant privacy and safety concerns, especially for parents of the platform’s younger users, who might accept friend requests without thoroughly vetting whoever sent it.īut the tool has some implications for brand communicators, says Andrea Limas, social media strategist for the University of San Francisco, and Kristy Gillentine, vice president of public engagement at Drive West Communications. The feature allows users to zoom in on neighborhoods, streets or even apartment buildings and acts as a heat map of sorts, using red to indicate where the most snaps and Stories are coming from and blue to illustrate a lack of activity. If your friends share their locations, their avatars will appear on the map, and those avatars can change depending on what the user is doing-a little airplane icon will appear when they're flying, for instance.

Snapchat introduced a new tracking feature called Snap Map last week, allowing users to share their location as well as see where their friends are and, in some cases, what they’re doing.

How to snap map