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Snapchat Attempts To Lure In New Users And Sports Fans With Tagboard

NEW YORK — Snapchat may be struggling to gain fans after posting dismal earnings in its first report since its initial public offering, but the company is starting to make greater efforts to attract new customers by expanding Snapchat beyond the smartphone screen and onto video boards and broadcast TV.

For the past year, Snapchat, a social media app that refers to itself as a “camera company,” has been partnering with Tagboard, a company with technology that pulls social feeds onto websites, broadcasts and jumbo screens at concerts and live sports events.

Outside of a few announcements here and there, the two have been tight-lipped about their partnership. But Snapchat, suffering a deceleration in user growth amid the launch of a rival service by Instagram, is growing more vocal about how it plans to lure in new users — and it has given Tagboard the green light to discuss some of their plans.

In an interview with SportTechie, Tagboard CEO Josh Decker said they’re scaling their partnership to help users who may not be active on the app “see more value in it” and want to engage with it more frequently.

To do that, the companies are offering sports teams and other organizations the ability to display Snapchat feeds of individual teams or players to fans at live events or on live streams or broadcasts. They’ve been offering this to a select few organizations in an almost beta-like trial run over the past 12 months, but they’re now expanding that access more widely and offering a more polished product.

The tie-up offers fans a behind-the-scenes peek at the personal and professional lives of their favorite players during breaks in the game. A football team, for example, might show a Snapchat story from a running back in the locker room during halftime and then shoot it out to fans on the video board.

Teams can provide an on-screen Snapcode — a Snapchat-branded QR code — alongside the Snapchat stories so that any person watching can then continue to follow along on their own Snapchat feeds.

The goal is to personalize the experience in effort to drive fans to the social pages of teams and players. Decker said the feature helps to spur community engagement by leveling the playing field between player and fan.

“It puts everyone on equal footing so you truly feel like you’re a part of it,” Decker told SportTechie on Tuesday afternoon from the 14th floor of The Players’ Tribune headquarters. “When you’re at the stadium it gives you the feeling of belonging.”

Decker wouldn’t provide specific numbers on how these plans have so far impacted user growth and engagement for Snapchat or the teams themselves, but he pointed to a quote from Doug Tatum, the director of digital media for the New Orleans Pelicans, who said the NBA team doubled its Snapchat followers in the first month using Tagboard’s Snapchat displays at games.

Currently, the Snapchat sports partnerships only include public stories posted by the organizations that work directly with Tagboard and the players approved by those organizations.

Decker would not say whether sports teams plan to eventually open up the video board to the Snapchat stories of fans as well, however Tagboard does offer a similar service already for Twitter and Instagram.

Tagboard, which will be the official aggregator of social content for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, boasts roughly 1.7 billion impressions globally across its entire platform every month. About 70 percent of those come from U.S. households in the form of daily news content, one of its biggest businesses outside of sports.

Snap’s reliance on Tagboard to draw in new users at sporting events is sort of how Twitter, also plagued by sluggish user growth, relies on the service to attract so-called “logged-out” users, or the people who reach and consume content on Twitter through third-party channels without having a Twitter account.

Snap’s daily users grew 36% year-over-year to 166 million in its fiscal first quarter, however that was only a slight sequential increase from 158 million in the fourth quarter and from 153 million in the quarter before that. Previously, Snap boasted much higher sequential growth rates, with daily active users jumping by 10 million from the second to the third quarter of last year and 21 million from the first to the second quarter.

Analysts have blamed much of the slowdown on last summer’s launch of Instagram Stories, which offers similar ephemeral real-time photo- and video-sharing capabilities.

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