Geofilters. Sounds high-tech but they’re actually super simple. If you haven’t heard of them or are interested in how to make your own, read on friends.
Who?
The fun and funky Snapchat! I highly doubt that there is anyone who hasn’t heard of these guys before – I mean come on, you’re reading a digital agency’s blog and we talk about social media A LOT!
When?
Officially rolled out in July of 2014, these geofilters were created by the team over at Snapchat for events and places they deemed worthy. It wasn’t until June 2015 that they realised they could sell branded geofilters to businesses and this brought them in big bucks! Now within the last year they have opened Geofilter production to the public, allowing anyone to create fun filters and submit them to the team over at SC for development.
What?
In techy terms, they are ‘graphical overlays available to users within a certain geographical location’. This pretty much means it’s a special sticker users can access by swiping left in certain locations and add to their Snap.
Why?
Why? Well, why not? For business Geofilters, it provides brand awareness and for personal events, they just look really cool! Don’t you guys think having a special Geofilter for your 21st or wedding would be awesome? Any photos people take can have the tag and so it will always be remembered that that cool photo where the lighting was super good and your hair looked great was taken at so-and-so’s wedding.
How?
Now that making Geofilters is available for public, it really is super easy to make your own – whether that be for your business or personal use. It’s literally as simple as opening a Photoshop, Illustrator or even Canva file to the dimensions of 1080 x 1920 pixels and making sure the finished product is under 300KB in size. Go nuts with your designs and then just head over to Snapchat On Demand. Log in, upload your work, set a time frame for the filter to run in, choose your location range and voila! Okay, that sounds like a lot of steps but it really is as simple as anything!
I always love seeing all the cool Geofilters available and have loved
giving a couple of designs a crack! To make the process even easier, our team here developed an app last year called Snapcheck that actually allows you to test out your Geofilters before submitting them to Snapchat. An easy to use and extremely handy tool, especially if your filters involve hats or glasses!