In just a few hours, Jeb Bush will be among the many 2016 presidential hopefuls experimenting with the disappearing messaging app, Snapchat.
Yahoo reports that representatives from the popular application will be on the ground snapping photos and videos for curation on Snapchat’s live story feed, which can be viewed by as many as 100 million of Snapchat’s daily users.
To be clear, this is not Jeb Bush joining Snapchat, like his snapchatting GOP opponents Sen. Rand Paul (SenatorRandPaul), Sen. Marco Rubio (marcorubio2016) and Gov. Rick Perry (GovernorPerry). Rather, it’s Snapchat using Bush’s campaign launch to showcase the app’s storytelling abilities.
Perry, on the other hand, snapchatted this just prior to his announcement and only got a reach equal to his followers.
On the Democratic side, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (governoromalley) used Snapchat to tease the location of his May 30th presidential announcement, and later live -snapped his 2016 announcement from the sidelines:
Hillary Clinton, like Jeb, is also not officially on Snapchat. But while delivering her first major speech of her campaign on Saturday, she was featured as part of Snapchat’s “Our Story.” Here, users at the event could contribute their own Snaps to a curated story:
While they didn’t snap, her campaign experimented in other ways with the popular annotation site Genius (formerly ‘Rap Genius) by annotating her full speech:
They also live streamed the entire rally on Periscope just after launching her campaign playlist on Spotify:
But what makes Bush’s Snapchat experiment unique (other than the fact he’s not officially on the platform) is it’s direct partnership with the social media company. Monday’s campaign event will mark the first time a candidate has leveraged a relationship with Snapchat to gain full access to the platforms active users — namely, the coveted 18-34 demographic. So far, others in the 2016 have been building their audience as an individual user without the force of Snapchat’s influence.
