Snapchat Makes it Easy for Millennials to Vote

I'd like to focus this week’s blog post on the 2016 presidential election. However, the focus isn't on the candidates themselves but on the importance of who is voting. An article on Adweek titled Snapchat Wants to Help Register Users to Vote in November focuses on a strategy to get millennials to the polls in November. What I find so interesting about this strategy is the use of a social media app to promote voter registration. This technology update may be a smart way to reach young voters but the content needs to be engaging. "The ads, which feature celebrities including Jared Leto, Ciara, Ryan Seacrest, Jimmy Fallon, and Dwayne Johnson, encourage U.S. adults to vote in their national, state and location elections (Swant)." Snapchat has become a very powerful way to reach a younger audience. We have seen this from many advertisers and companies that use Snapchat as a platform for advertising.

Yet, is Snapchat a powerful enough platform to get millennials to vote? From personal experience and being a millennial myself I believe that using celebrities could be beneficial but it's really going to be what the celebrities say in terms of content that will get millennials to vote. They will need to relate to the younger generation when convincing us to go and vote, and provide us with an easy way to register. "The snaps themselves can't help would-be voters go quite all the way, but they will direct people to a mobile website to go through the rest of the process (Swant)." According to many statistics, for many years there haven’t been a lot of young voters. “Back in 2010, the last midterm election fewer than a quarter of voters ages 18 to 29 showed up to the polls (Seipel).” We have seen a lot of coverage for this year’s election and I think that alone plus the candidates is going to get more millennials to the polls. Snapchat is powerful platform but so are the candidates, so it will be interesting to see the voter turnout for the 2016 election.

This YouTube video provides instructions on how to register to vote using Snapchat.