Snap, the parent company for Snapchat, broke the news of their new feature, Context Cards on Tuesday. Context Cards allows your Snapchat friends and those who follow you to easily access reviews and reserve a table or a seat at the location tagged in the original snap. With Context Cards, users can tag their location within Snapchat, thus opening the door to their friends and followers of new-to-them restaurants and bars in their area.

The installation of Context Cards is not only valuable to the users of Snapchat, either. There is much to be had in this niche of the free branding and marketing world for businesses. For example, if you’re the owner of an up-and-coming diner in the downtown area of a select city, the best marketing you can get is word of mouth. After all, you’re new around these parts, and people don’t know whether to trust what you’re offering up yet. With Context Cards, a Snapchat user can simply tag themselves at your restaurant, granting their friends and followers access to an arsenal of information. From scrolling through restaurant reviews powered by TripAvisor to the having the ability to reserving a table via OpenTable, SnapChat has streamlined the consumers process in one easy, discovery-driven step.

By opening up the door to Context Cards, SnapChat has rebranded itself in one simple move. Not only are they a platform that is used across the board by a variety of users, but they’re now innovating the marketing and discovery world, too. By integrating the process of finding new places and finding ways to get there, Snapchat has joined the likings of Google as a search platform that easily showcases reviews to users who care to find out more about a specific place, and tells them exactly how to get there on a map. This is a move that many businesses should welcome, as it provides them marketing without lifting a finger, and showcases their raving reviews in an app used by millions worldwide.

Discovery is one thing, but providing the necessary information upon discovering a new place is another beast in itself. Rivaling a well-known competitor such as Yelp is a tall task, but something Snapchat has willingly taken on full-force. By partnering up with the likings of TripAdvisor, Snapchat has integrated reviews into the process of discovering; advertising for restaurants with minimal effort on the restaurant’s front. With this integration, it’s vital for bars and restaurants to maintain their online reputations for the sake of savoring old clientele, while basking in the ability to easily access the new clientele, as well.

Lee McNiel