If you are an active Snapchat user, you know that there are fun, little Geofilters you can overlay on top of your videos, and your pictures, and Snapchat in order to kind of personalize it and decorate it a little bit.
I want to talk about Snapchat. Because, for those of you who are developing your YouTube channels and your audiences, or just generally speaking online, especially if you are a personality-type of brand channel, or blog, or podcast, whatever, Snapchat can be an awesome tool for you to keep your audience engaged with relatively little effort on your part.
I’ve been playing with Snapchat a lot, especially on the video side, and it really is an amazing tool for connecting, staying in touch with fans and followers, and keeping them engaged, providing more value to them, lots of awesome stuff.
What I want to talk about today are the custom Geofilters that Snapchat has and how to make one. I’m going to get my desktop because you need to do this from your computer, and then you also need to submit it to Snapchat through your computer as well.
I’m just at snapchat.com. This is what you see when you get here. Down at the bottom, click this little arrow, and right here under community, click on Geofilters. And what this is going to let you do is submit one. Once it loads, you’ll see some of the other ones other people have created and submitted. Just click on this and let’s do it right in the middle.
Here are the guidelines that you need to follow for the dimensions. And so, if you’re using Photoshop or Pic Monkey, this is what you’re going to enter in as a transparent, this is really important, transparent PNG image, 1080 is going to be the width, 1920 is going to be the pixels. Basically a 1080p resolution for edge wise on the side.
Make sure you leave 149 pixels at the top and the bottom. It’s buffered, don’t put anything over there. And then also you just need to avoid the borders. Don’t wrap something all the way around. You can put something around the sides if you want, but don’t wrap it all the way around.
The other submission guidelines basically tell you you can’t use any logos and you can’t have any artwork on it other than what you have created originally all by yourself. You can’t use any one else’s work or images or anything like that. All original material.
So you’re just going to come to the map and I want to do one of the airport. I live in Cincinnati. I fly in and out of the airport a lot. So you’re just going to click to draw borders around the area where you want this Snapcode to work, to show up when people in Snapchat for people.
So I’m just going to say, I would love to have one every time I come to Cincinnati airport. So I’m just going to make it like that. Click it and you can right click on corners if you want to undo them. So if I go undo that one, happen but I’m just going to drag it back like that.
So that’s basically the area where I want this Snapcode to appear. Then come in to upload your images and I’ve created this one right here. And I’ve put a little airplane, Welcome to Cincinnati, CBG airport. You’re going to type in your name and your email, why this location is meaningful to you, any additional notes you want to say about it.
This is not an event. So if you use this one first visit with an event, like a concert or something, maybe you would want to uncheck that. And then make sure it’s all your original work, does not create any trademarks or logos, and that you agree to the terms of service. Click I am not a robot and then click Submit.
What will happen next is that it will upload and submit that image that you created to Snapchat and they’ll take something like a few days, sometimes a few weeks, to go check it out and approve it. You will get an email confirmation telling them right after you submit it, one, saying yes, we received it and then you also get an email confirmation again later, after they’ve approved it.
I would love to hear from you guys if you’ve ever created any custom Geofilters for Snapchat. What your experience with it has been like. If you have any good tips for how to create Geofilters that are more likely to be approved. Definitely leave those comments down below as well.
As well as tell me what you think about Snapchat as a whole for using it for your YouTube audience development, or your blog, or your progress, or however you’re developing your audience. I’ve found it to be an extremely valuable tool and I’ll be talking more about that here.
But the meantime, comments below if you’re interested in Snapchat. Hear what other people are saying down there. I know you will learn a lot from them.