By: Elizabeth Lemuz |@lizrlemuz

Snapchat has evolved into more than just an app you use to send a selfie to friends. It’s now become a marketing tool for businesses. According to Digiday,Snapchat went from 16.3 million users in 2013 to 25.3 million in 2014, a growth due in part to the app’s new Live Story feature.

Live Stories are videos and pictures that users take and post to their Snapchat accounts for followers to see what they are up to, but these are only up for 24 hours after they are first posted.

When Snapchat first introduced advertisements, they did so with Brand Stories. Recode describes these stories as “the equivalent of sponsored stories, allowing a marketer to share photos and video content with users that aren’t following them.”A good example of this is Universal Studios with the movie “Ouija.” Universal Studios sponsored an advertisement for “Ouija” on the Snapchat app for all users to see. It was a shorter version of the movie trailer so users could tap the ad and see the trailer right from the app. It was like any other story of a friend the user may have been following, except it was paid for by Universal. The image below from AdWeekrepresents how it was shown in the app.

Now, Snapchat has created Our Story, a new way of sharing stories from all around the world. In June, Snapchat came out with a story about the AMAs, which was sponsored by Samsung. According to TechCrunch, “The AMA Our Story intersplices ‘Sponsored’-tagged Samsung photos and videos from behind the scenes at the AMAs with user-generated shots from the crowd and red carpet.”If people were attending this event, they were able to share their images or videos in Our Story specifically for the AMAs. After all of the images and videos of the event were put together, Samsung had short advertisements put in between the images.

These sponsored stories allow anyone who isn’t at the event to experience it from different perspectives, which is much better than one person trying to capture the whole event. This is what Snapchat does. It is innovative and rapidly earning the title as the favorite social media app for many users.

The app has also redesigned the way it is displayed to users. It has the Discovery feature and the Live Story feature on the front page of the user’s story and recent updates, as shown below.

Snapchat is listening to its users and making it an easier app to use. As such, there are many more users now than when the app first became widely known. This is why brands are so attracted to be part of this new revolution.

With the use of apps like this, videos and images have become much more enticing to generations today. Additionally, the extensive use and popularity of this app means that we can’t run away from ads. Unlike traditional advertisements, these ads are shorter and blend in perfectly with the stories being watched.

Who wouldn’t want to reach out to a larger audience by adding a few advertisements to a very popular social media platform? Snapchat is definitely changing how the public views it, and the app is growing faster by the day and getting better and better.