In the previous parts of this series I covered different types of stories, tools, and thinking about narrative. In this extract from the ebook Snapchat for Journalists I cover the practicalities of storing, sharing and measuring your Snapchat stories.

Sharing your Snapchat Story

Each snap in a story only lasts for 24 hours, so it’s worth making sure you share them as early as possible, and regularly before they have finished.

You cannot share a link to your Snapchat story: people need to be following you on Snapchat and checking it for notifications. Whenever you add a new snap to your story, they will receive a subtle notification within Snapchat.

To share it you have a number of options:

1. Tell people your username and invite them to follow your story on Snapchat. You can combine this with an image of your and a link to your ‘follow me’ on Snapchat URL (see below)
2. Share individual snaps (video or images) directly to other social media platforms
3. Share video of the ‘story so far’ to other social media platforms (when you export a story it is saved as a single video clip, even if all the snaps are photos)

Your ‘snapcode’ image is the yellow rounded edge square on your Snapchat profile with an image in the middle (take a screenshot).

Users can add you by saving that Snapcode to their photos, and then selecting it from the Snapchat ‘Add friends > Add by Snapcode‘ menu option.

Your ‘follow me’ URL can be found in your Snapchat profile under ‘Add Friends’ > ‘Share username’.

It follows the format snapchat.com/add/YOURUSERNAME.

For example to add me on Snapchat the link is snapchat.com/add/paulbradshawuk.

When someone clicks on this link on their phone it will automatically activate the Snapchat app, and ask the user to confirm that they want to add you as a friend.

You can share your Story so far by going to the Stories screen: at the top of that screen will be your story (‘My story’).

If you tap the ‘download’ button next to it, a video of that story will be downloaded to your phone’s camera roll, and you can share it on social media (be aware that video is limited to 30 seconds on Twitter, 60 on Instagram and 6 on Vine)

To download individual snaps tap the three dots to the right of your story: it will expand so you can see each snap in that story.

Tap on any individual snap to see an option in the upper right corner to download that snap to your camera roll.

Metrics

While your story is live you can see how many people have viewed it.

You can do this by swiping right-to-left so that you are on the ‘Stories’ page in Snapchat. At the top of that screen will be your story (‘My story’). If you tap the three dots to the right of that, your story will expand so you can see each snap in that story.

To the right of each snap you should see an eye icon and a number, representing how many people have viewed that particular snap (if there is no eye/number then it hasn’t been seen at all yet).

You can tap the eye on any snap, or go into it and swipe up to see which specific users have seen that snap.

Some snaps will have more views than others, either because people stopped halfway through your story, or because at that point that snap was the latest part in the story and they haven’t checked back since.

If a lot of people are abandoning your story at a particular point, however, you might get an indication of that here. And you can delete problematic snaps (perhaps a video which was too long, or too boring) by tapping on that snap in this view.

Once you tap on any individual snap, it will replay on your screen. At the bottom, however, you will also see 4 options:

* The ‘eye’ icon tells you how many views that particular snap has had
* The double arrows icon tells you how many screenshots have been taken of this snap
* The bin icon is where you can delete this snap from your story
* The downward-pointing arrow allows you to download this snap to your phone’s photo roll

Storing your Snapchat story

Once your story is finished (or almost expired) you can save the whole story to your phone’s photo roll as detailed above: by tapping on the three dots to expand your story and then tapping on the downward-arrow-within-a-circle which then appears next to those three dots.

The story will be downloaded as a single vertical video file. You can then email this to yourself.

You can get the book on Leanpub or the Kindle Store.