* Snapchat aims to grow market share with multimedia distribution
* First televised snap was at 2016 Billboard Latin Music Awards
* Tagboard partnership has been in effect for a year
Youth-oriented social media platform Snapchat is seeking to increase its footprint and attract new users via a recently announced partnership with Tagboard, the five-year-old software company that aggregates social media content and puts it on television and the jumbotron at major events.
Although Tagboard first put a snap on television during the 2016 Billboard Latin Music Awards, the company had kept mum over the past 12 months on its work to get snaps, Snapchat Stories and Snapcodes shown on television and in sports stadiums. Mashable speculates that pressure from Wall Street led to the revelation, given Snapchat’s recent publicized losses. Anytime you’ve seen Snapchat content outside of the app, it’s been because of Tagboard.
The company is also noted for its work with professional sports teams like the Seattle Mariners and Minnesota Vikings, television networks like Telemundo and NBC’s Golf Channels, and concerts like Capital One Jamfest.
“Everything that we do, everything is relationship-based,” says Tagboard CEO Josh Decker. “A lot of that has to do with trust. The people that we work with at Snap are some of the best people that we work with, and they’re looking for ways to support us.”
The partnership does beg the question: Why can’t social media companies just do it themselves? The answer is that formatting the content is more complicated than it seems. Plus, as Decker explains, Tagboard specializes in those kinds of distribution relationships.
What this all means is increased visibility for brands and attendees of major events, who may now have the chance to see their content on the big screens. It also means continued development from Snapchat, into programming beyond its popular video messaging system. The good news: they’ve already started looking into that.
