Hello and welcome to the next blog in my social media series. The next network I will be using is Snapchat. This app was released in July of 2011. The purpose of Snapchat is to send pictures or “snaps” to your friends and to add pictures to your story for everyone to see. I hope this blog helps you and makes you want to create an account for yourself.

First, I will teach you how to create an account. When you download the app click “sign up”. From there you will enter your name and birthdate. Your name will be able to be viewed by everyone. Your birthdate will be used for people to know when your birthday is. You can turn this preference off in the settings. Next, you will create a username. This is how people will add you on Snapchat. You will have to create a strong and secure password for future logins to your account. Once you finish all these steps it will prompt you to enter a phone number to verify your account.

Next, I will tell you how to work Snapchat. To properly use the app, you will need to add friends. You can do this by either search, scanning a barcode, or quick add.  If you would like to snap someone you can go to the camera tab, take a picture or video, and send it to whoever you would like. Once you take a picture or video you can put text on it, draw, stickers, music, effects, links, and crop. You can also decide how many seconds you want someone to view your picture. Anywhere from one to ten or infinity. There is a place where you can save and store memories. This is where you can keep snaps that you take on Snapchat.

There are emojis that are next to friends for certain things. This includes “besties”(#1 mutual bff), “bff” (#1 mutual bff for two weeks in a row), “super bff”(#1 mutual bff for two months in a row), “bfs”(appears to one of your best friends), “mutual besties”(appears next to someone when you are both sharing the same #1 best friend), “mutual bfs”(appears next to someone you share a best friend with), “snapstreak”(appears when a friend and you both mutually snap each other every day within 24 hours), “pinned conversation”(appears next to a friend or group if you pinned them to the top of your screen).

The first tab at the bottom of your screen is “snap location”. This is where you can see your friend’s location if they have it turned on. They can also see yours if you have that on in your preferences. The next tab is your chats. This is where you can text, snap, or video chat with your friends. The third tab is the camera that I talked about earlier.

The fourth tab is where you can watch all your friends’ stories which is a cluster of photos and videos that they post. Below your friend’s stories there is “subscriptions”. This is where anyone who is verified on Snapchat can post and if you are subscribed to them, they will appear here. This is where businesses can market their product with ads. They can pay influencers to talk about their product for more people to see. If customers see their favorite influencer using the product that will hopefully make them want to use it. The last tab is “spotlight”. This is like Tiktok where you can post videos for entertainment. Now that I have gone through most of Snapchat you should be all set to start.

In summary, Snapchat is a great tool for anyone to use. This can be used to help businesses grow and advertise themselves. I went over most of the things used on Snapchat that will help you get started. I hope that you learned something and decide to start an account of your own. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas/requests on what my next blog should be about, feel free to contact me on any of my social medias linked on my home page. As always, thank you for reading my blog.