Image message and multimedia mobile app Snapchat has its advocates and its detractors but whatever opinion you may hold about the platform, the company is rolling out some interesting new capabilities (and no, we're not talking about GIFS) that will be attractive to social influencers and advertisers alike.
Snapchat is essentially now allowing a handful of users, those who are currently part of Snapchat's official Stories program (which is very exclusive and limited to those with a substantial number of followers) to access some analytics-related data about their audience, including the number of total story views, basic engagement metrics, and even some general demographic data.
The addition of analytics and audience insights could prove appealing to creators who were previously only able to understand performance by monitoring their views before a story expired (which obviously made it rather difficult to track over time). This analytics-related rollout is also appealing as Instagram (and many others including Google's new AMP Stories) do not have similar functionality (yet).
It's difficult to say whether providing this data will attract more social creators to Snapchat or encourage advertisers to dedicate spend as a result of better content being delivered by these influencers, but it is certainly a path in the right direction.