They say, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but what about the value of a series of photos and videos that share your perspective?
If you’re a Snapchat user, chances are you have already used “My Story” to share an event or life experience with your followers for 24 hours.
A new feature released in August called “Our Story” put user narratives on a grander scale. Raw video and images taken by users at certain major events are crowdsourced and republished by Snapchat. Essentially, the goal is to share the experience of being at the big event with the millions of users who are not physically there.
“My Story has always represented a singular, personal experience,” according to Snapchat. “We wanted to build something that offered a community perspective – lots of different points of view. After all, our friends often see the same things in totally different ways.”
Hours before last night’s World Series game in Kansas City, Snapchat began sharing these moments captured by several users attending the game. Videos of fans dancing in the car on the way to the game, selfies from the seats, and post-game emotions were all shared as part of this “Game 1 in KC” feature. But how did these fans get included in the story? The location services function detects whether a user is at the featured event. Once the snap is taken, the option to share with “Our Story” appears on your list of send options. From there, Snapchat receives all submissions and publishes the best ones.
Reinventing the live-stream with personalized, crowdsourced content, the Our Story feature has seen incredible success. With over 30 million active monthly users, Snapchat is now able to engage sports fans across the globe.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Snapchat’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Evan Spiegel, revealed, “More people are watching college football on Snapchat than they are on television.”
With other past successes, including College Gameday and the World Cup, the Our Story feature continues to help Snapchat become a valuable asset for creating fan engagement in the sports industry.