Snapped
BuzzFeed Murder Mystery Stories
Snapped & Lake Nowhere
I produced and co-wrote this series for BuzzFeed’s Snapchat Discover. With so many learnings from the first season, we had the opportunity to make a second season with more characters, more features, and more chances for audience engagement.
Watch Season One Below:
Season One: Snapped
Buzzfeed Murder Mystery Stories’ first season, Snapped, was the first scripted episodic show tested for a vertical screen on BuzzFeed's Snapchat Discover platform. A murder mystery about a missing high school student that dealt with themes of betrayal and friendship.
Our publishing schedule consisted of a new episode everyday for 5 days. We followed each episode with a poll so the audience could vote on who they thought the killer would be.
We made sure the series was completely native to the snapchat interface featuring video calls, text chats, and interactive character accounts. We aimed to fill the screen with as many native features as possible to make the viewer feel like they didn’t need to exit the app to feel engaged. Our watch time metrics showed that viewer’s responded well to the length of the episodes and were coming back for more!
Viewer Engagement Finds A Way
Because there was no public forum on Snapchat for the viewers to discuss and connect, talk of the series travelled to Twitter where the hashtag #BuzzFeedSnapped started on its own.
Season Two: Lake Nowhere
With so much momentum coming off of the first season, we got to work right away. We branded the series as BuzzFeed Murder Mystery Stories and concentrated on making the mystery more of a puzzle. Our new setting was a cabin in the woods. Only one character from the first season would carry over and a new list of suspects would provide more characters to interact with.
Aside from creating a more elaborate story, our goal was to add more features and supplemental material that allowed users to interact with each other. We created custom geo-filters that the viewer could use, games they could play after the episodes, and built out a fake location for the characters on Snap Maps.
Our publishing strategy remained the same, one new episode for 5 days. We added 2 more slots of supplemental content and experimented with longer episode lengths.
Learnings
2 of the 5 episodes over-performed on watch time metrics. We introduced new ways to share on mobile allowing users to screenshot and send their content to friends through the app.
Although Snapchat is a ephemeral platform, engagement is memorialized because it still moved to Twitter. The only difference is we started our own hashtag with #LakeNowhere.
