How to Get More Friends on Snapchat (When Nobody Knows You)

While Instagram is fantastic for showcasing products and edited “best versions,” Snapchat kills it at offering that more immediate, raw feel when it comes to presentation.

The social platform may take a bunch of heat from critics who compare it to Instagram’s astonishing 1.35 billion users, but they’re dead wrong.

While the two platforms may be similar, Snapchat differs entirely from its larger rivals.

That said, if you want to succeed on this often-overlooked site, you must understand how to get more friends on Snapchat. The bigger your audience, the more likely you are to create traction and win new conversions.

In this article, I’ll detail tips to grow your friends, provide examples of Snapchat marketing, and detail some of its features. However, first, let’s look at the basics.

Why You Should Grow Your Snapchat Following

Snapchat provides a unique platform to promote your business on. With disappearing images, Snap Map, and fun filters, it has features that inspire creativity and offer new ways to grow your audience.

You know what that means for you? Well, you could win over a new audience. Snapchat is popular among Generation Z (people born in the mid-nineties to 2012), so if you’re looking for a younger demographic, Snapchat could be ideal.

Another reason you’d want a presence on Snapchat is engagement. With so many different tools, you can take advantage of Snapchat and the numerous ways it gives you to draw prospects in and keep them entertained.

How to Get Snapchat Friends and Followers

In this section, we’ll explore some simple and effective tips for growing your Snapchat audience. You can implement these steps today and start building your following, developing relationships, and promoting your business.

Invite Contacts and Share Your QR Code on Social and Email

Leveraging your existing contacts and connections is an easy way to gain followers on Snapchat.

These are the most accessible followers because they know you and will likely follow you right back.

To do this, head to your Snapchat profile and click on the “Add Friends” button:

From here, select the “Contacts” menu and click “Find Friends” to allow Snapchat access to your contacts and social profiles.

Then navigate back to “Add Friends.” In this section, Snapchat has a long, curated list of everyone you can add with one tap.

Now just sit back, relax, and wait for your friends and family to follow you back. That should get the ball rolling.

Next, you can tap into existing followers on any other social platforms you’re on.

Chances are, your followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram use Snapchat. Maybe not all of them, but some of them surely do.

You can create a Snapchat code and invite them to follow you:

Open your Snapchat account and head over to settings

Hit ‘create Snapcode,’ enter your website’s URL, then select ‘create’

That’s it. It really is that easy!

If you want to add an image, click the ghost icon and select a picture. Snapchat can also pull images from the link to which you point your QR code.

This makes it extremely easy for users to follow you. All they have to do is save the image, open Snapchat, and import the picture.

To find your own Snapchat QR code, head to your profile on the mobile app and click on your profile name and image:

This will bring up a menu of three choices:

First, you can share your Snapcode directly from your profile via email, text, or social media.

I recommend that you simply save your Snapcode to your camera roll.

Let me explain why:

If users are newer to Snapchat, they might not know how to add you via the QR code function; for this step, select “Save Snapcode to Camera Roll.”

One of my favorite tools for creating fast graphics is Canva. Taking that newly created Snapcode from your camera roll, you can import it directly into Canva and create a graphic for social media.

First, fire up Canva and select the generic “Social Graphic” template.

In the image editor, head to the “Uploads” section and upload the Snapcode that you downloaded previously:

You can then choose from pre-made Canva templates for a design that fits your branding.

If you don’t want a pre-made template, you can always edit your own using more uploaded content or background colors.

In just a few minutes of editing and tweaking, I created this simple graphic to post on social channels:

Be sure to include simple instructions to reduce any potential friction.

Now take your graphic and add it to your most active social channels.

Once done, you can move onto your email list as a secondary way to drive social follows.

The key here is to provide incentives to follow your Snapchat. You have to make it worthwhile for users.

For example, if you focus on personal branding, can you offer them free content or a coupon for your online course?

If you sell products, can you offer them a small discount?

Now, let’s move on to another technique to get more Snapchat friends.

Use Bitmoji and Augmented Reality to Create Viral Content

Snapchat is a highly engaging platform and provides a great opportunity to capture attention. It also poses some serious challenges:

Saturation: Thousands of companies and brands use Snapchat, posting daily with excellent content. Finding articles that haven’t already been covered end-to-end makes viral content hard to create.

Competition: With so many brands using Snapchat, getting attention is harder than ever, despite engagement being through the roof.

Luckily, Snapchat has a few tools up its sleeves with serious potential for crafting viral content, even if your brand isn’t well-known.

Bitmoji is a key addition to Snapchat that has become a cornerstone of content. It allows you to customize a virtual avatar that looks exactly like you.

You can use your Bitmoji on your Snapcode, in actual snaps and photos, and even messaging across Snapchat or other social platforms.

Its ease of use with Snapchat makes it widely popular. Users can simply take a selfie, and Bitmoji instantly builds a potential avatar for them:

You can use the search bar to find relevant Bitmoji scenarios. Everything from specific foods to events and keywords brings up new Bitmojis.

Setting up Bitmoji is extremely easy and can only improve and aid in your content creation.

Download the application on your phone and connect the two to get started.

Bitmoji will prompt you to connect to Snapchat. Next, edit your avatar, which will quickly populate your Snapchat profile, giving you new avatars to use in any photo you send to friends, followers, and your story.

BitMoji can also help you get more from Snapchat’s augmented reality (AR) features.

McDonald’s put the AR features to great use when it promoted its McPlant burger. The world-famous burger chain used the AR filter to let Snapchat users create their own plant burgers correctly within 30 minutes.

It’s a fun, engaging way to draw viewers in and create interest in the new plant burger product.

How do you get started with Snapchat’s AR tools? Just follow these steps:

On your Snapchat, head over to take a new Snap, but click on the smiley face button next to your camera button:

This will instantly bring up a scrollable menu of augmented reality features that you can use for any photo as engadget demonstrates below:

Use these new and constantly updating AR features to create the most engaging, funny, viral content possible.

Run an Interactive Snapchat Giveaway

Everybody loves a good giveaway.

I mean, who doesn’t like getting free things?

It’s no secret that giveaways can greatly impact sales, grow your followers, and increase your email list. However, they can also help you get more Snapchat friends too.

Don’t believe me? Let me give you a few examples.

Grooming and lifestyle company Manscaped capture the essentials of a Snapchat giveaway below:

Their Snapchat campaign resulted in a 17 percent increase in company revenue, a 13 percent increase in new customer acquisitions, and a 21 percent increase in average order value when compared with other platforms. Not too shabby huh?