Snapchat, for anyone over age 30, is scary. Even their icon is a little off putting: a ghost with an obnoxious yellow background. The true fright is when you open the app for the first time and see your own face staring back at you. For the selfie generation it’s obvious why this app is such a hit, but for the generation X and older crowd, we’re still scratching our heads.

The 90-second tour for Snapchat is this: There’s no chatting in Snapchat. It’s a fun app to take selfies and pictures, add filters, swap faces, create small videos and send them to your friends or post on your “story.” It’s fun and silly, frustrating to learn, but addictive once you do. So why has this new app become a topic for business?

If your business targets young people, then you should start marketing on Snapchat because that’s where the young people are. According to Snapchat, 37% of their monthly users are ages 18-24 and 26% are ages 25-34. Furthermore, this app is made for the mobile device. So if you’ve been struggling to make your marketing message mobile friendly, this platform is where you need to be. A great example of a business that has successfully targeted this audience is GrubHub.com. They used the Snapchat Stories feature to look for an intern. Candidates had to submit their best doodle to apply. Read more about it here.

Another successful campaign was demonstrated by the candy maker, Sour Patch Kid’s. Again, by using the Stories feature they were able to capture the attention of their teen audience with a 5-day series of short stories featuring Vine star, Logan Paul. The result was thousands of new followers and over 580,000 impressions on day 1. Sour Patch Kid’s (@sourpatchsnaps) . Read more about it here.

We’re On Snapchat, Now What?

Snapchat provides a unique way for you to interact with your customers. It’s the perfect platform for you to share the inner workings of your company, the people behind the scenes, the culture. You can use this platform to bring the fun side of your company to your customers, post tutorials about your product, or videos of your product in use. Or, if you’re Audi, you can blow people away with your Snapchat campaign like they did on Super Bowl Sunday.

Audi’s clever use of stock photos with humorous headlines provided the perfect second-screen experience for Super Bowl fans that to some, was more exciting than the game itself. Read about their clever marketing technique here.

For Those Who Have Trouble Snapping

There are a few roadblocks to using Snapchat for business. Because there is no news feed and no hashtags it’s difficult to build your audience. You can start by asking your customers to follow you or you can give them your Snapcode. Remember that scary yellow icon with black dots and your picture in the middle? That’s your Snapcode. You can take a screenshot of your code and add it to your social media accounts. Users then simply point their Snapchat camera over the icon and they can automatically follow.