Snapchat is one of the most popular social media platforms, consistently attracting a wide variety of users. In April 2022, Snapchat gained 332 million daily active users, with that figure due to increase year on year. The platform also welcomes an assortment of advertising features, helping brands and influencers monetize their content and break into untapped markets. Netinfluencer has delved into these features and has uncovered everything you need to know about their latest Snapchat Essentials course.

What is Snapchat?

Snapchat launched in July 2011, gaining 40,000 daily active users in its first five months. The platform was originally created as a picture messaging app, allowing users to share the full experience that is attached to a photo. By 2014, 40% of 18-year-olds in America were using the app daily. 

Users can share photos to their entire follower base or just a selected few. They can also customize how long the photo is visible for, making this the ideal platform for short-form content. 

In October 2014, Snapchat launched its most popular venture, Snapchat Stories. This allowed users to share a series of photos in chronological order, all of which are only visible for 24 hours. Other platforms quickly jumped on this trend, making stories a common feature on a majority of social media platforms.

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What is Snapchat Focus?

In 2020, It launched its first education portal, giving influencers and marketers an assortment of resources to help them find profitable success on the platform. Snapchat Focus has multiple courses detailing how users can create successful and fully-optimized campaigns.

Each course has many sections, ensuring that users are learning fundamental principles in an approachable and digestible way. Users will also need to complete a simple online exam in order to fully conclude their learning. 

In order to access Snapchat Focus, you must have an Ads Manager account. This is different from your normal Snapchat account and requires users to sign up again with new login information. Once you have created an Ads Manager account, you can use these details to access the courses on offer.

Snapchat Focus provides a selection of courses, ranging in both duration and difficulty. Some courses give users an Award, making these more credible within the influencer marketing industry. These courses are listed below.

• Mobile Games Essentials
• Ads Manager Campaign Optimization
• Apps Essentials
• Brand Safety on Snapchat
• Ads Manager Campaign Activation
• Privacy-Centric Ad Measurement
• Public Profiles for Businesses
• E-Commerce Essentials
• Snapchat Essentials
• Augmented Reality Strategies for Advertisers

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Why use the Snapchat Essentials course?

The Snapchat Essentials course teaches users how to build an engaging campaign, from the initial idea to the finished product. This course is ideal for marketers who are looking to use Snapchat for their next advertising campaign as it explores the platform’s interface as well as its demographics.

This course details how marketers can measure the success of their campaigns, extrapolating data from their personal analytics dashboard. As such, this is useful for SMEs who are embarking on their first campaign and want to ensure that they are earning a prosperous ROI.

The final step is an exam and survey, giving users the chance to put their learning into practice. As this is a beginner’s course, it should only take around 2 hours to complete. Thus, users can gain valuable certification without taking too much time out of their day.

What are the courses?

Snapchat Essentials is split into seven courses, each exploring a different element of the platform’s advertising abilities. 

1. Intro to Snapchat

The first course gives users a glimpse into Snapchat’s origins, explaining typical consumer habits and trends. This section also shows how new users can create their first post on the platform. Here, you will also discuss how users watch content on Snapchat and what type of content is most successful with various audiences.

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2. The Snapchat Generation

The second stage gives an overview of Snapchat’s main demographics. This is a very useful step if you are looking for appropriate ways to better market your content for Millennials and Gen Z. The Snapchat Generation also states what features each demographic uses on a regular basis, helping users to better streamline their campaigns to suit their respective audiences. 

3. Advertising on Snapchat

Advertising on Snapchat is possibly the most integral course within Snapchat Essentials. This lesson explores how Snapchat financially supports its creators and other brands. Users will learn how they can boost their ROI on each campaign and reach customers as it continues to grow and develop. You will also learn how to create, publish, and track an ad campaign on this platform.

4. Getting Started on Ads Manager

Once you have learned how to set up an ad on Snapchat, the Getting Started on Ads Manager course will explain how you can extrapolate data from your campaign. The fourth course gives an overview of the analytics dashboard and educates users on the differences between campaigns and ad sets. This course aims to help users track their spending and ensure that their CPM rate can provide financial success for their campaign. 

5. Creative Best Practices 

This course goes into more detail about Snapchat’s plethora of features. Users will learn how to implement immersive filters and lenses in order to build striking and engaging ads. Plus, this course explores which audiences use certain features, again helping brands better cater to their niches. 

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6. Measure and Optimize Campaigns 

The penultimate course discusses how Snapchat measures the success of its campaigns. Ad Manager allows brands to customize their dashboard to ensure that they can focus on the metrics that matter to them. Users can also add other team members to this platform to create a collaborative environment all within Snapchat’s dashboard. The sixth course also explains how users can optimize their campaigns, helping them to track certain data and better align with the initial goals of the campaign. 

7. Final Exam and Survey

The final step asks users to complete a multiple-choice exam. This part focuses on all of the major talking points throughout the course and better tests their understanding. Snapchat then encourages users to complete a small survey to help improve the learning experience for future students.

How to receive a certification

In order to receive an accredited certification on Snapchat Focus, you must complete the knowledge checks at the end of every chapter. These steps ensure that users have fully understood the content and have actually absorbed the information. 

For certain courses, you must complete a short exam. For the Snapchat Essentials course, users have 30-minutes to answer 20 questions and must achieve a pass rate of 80% to gain the certification.

Students can access their certifications on their profile page within the Snapchat Focus interface. From here, users can print out a PDF copy of their certificate and post their award on their LinkedIn profile. 

Snapchat was a pioneer within the social media industry and continues to release new features to help creators and marketers reach new audiences. Snapchat Focus makes advertising more accessible, building a more sustainable future for the influencer marketing industry. To discover more about the benefits of Snapchat, visit our website.