Oo Snap! Thought SnapChat would be a Fad? Well you thought wrong.

Snapchat. It’s already got 100 million daily active users and although currently the majority of those users are ages 13-34, pretty much every social channel from Facebook to Twitter started with the youth (SnapChat's Website). According, to Simmonds, the average attention span has dropped by more than 50 % from 12 to 5 minutes in just the last ten years. He says it best, “Snapchat is a tool that captures someone’s entire attention for a few seconds and has the ability to cut through the attention crisis” Marketing Guide to SnapChat).  Snapchatters are really passionate and it clearly is more than just a fad for teenagers to send risqué photos that will automatically disappear. Slowly, businesses are starting to realize this and the smart ones are taking advantage because the “attention crisis” is not about to end and Snapchat is continually growing.

The hottest emerging app and social based opportunity, apart from live streaming, is definitely the mobile wallet and money sharing. Major tech firms from Apple to Google and Facebook (on the social side) have developed or are working on this technology because they’ve realized that as people are doing more and more from their phones, there is no real need for physical wallets anymore. I personally would be happy to do away with my wallet when the technology becomes ubiquitous enough and safe. Peer to peer cash transactions have already caught on and I use a separate app called Venmo but if Snapchat can convince its youthful users (who are more likely to make monetary transactions online) to trust its ‘Snapcash’ for sending their friends money in addition to goofy photos, it will be a strong win for the social app. There are an overwhelming number of apps today and it’s really hard to compete especially when everyone is pushing similar new functions; however, Snapchat has already proved that it is legitimately a one of a kind app that people love.

Currently, it is making a push to be used by businesses despite not being a platform that intuitively seems suited for business content, as Grubhub astutely recognizes and uses to show their sense of humor. (Mashable)  Many media companies from ESPN, to Comedy Central to National Geographic, have already adopted it and use the “Stories” feature. It is still an underutilized opportunity for brands (Simmonds Marketing Guide to SnapChat ). You get these fun little clips of whatever surprise content; it’s the perfect compliment to getting the “cat on a boat” video or whatever your friends are sharing with you inexplicably on Snapchat.  Admittedly, as the whitepaper “Selfies, SnapChat, So What? The 2015 Social Admissions Report” explains, it is difficult to measure ROI on Snapchat (Chegg and Uversity). However, it is a unique space for giving users an intimate, behind the scenes look inside an organization. Intel created a tour of their museum and Snapchatters liked it enough to share screenshots! Screenshots are another great way to engage with Snapchatters in a unique way—the creators of the movie “Romeo and Juliet” used a contest to generate hundreds of tweets with screenshots of their cast (Simmonds Marketing Guide to SnapChat).  From a great visual marketing platform for teens and twenty-something’s to one of my most engaging photo/video sharing apps around, this four-year-old app is still rapidly growing. If it isn’t already, it’s sure to be the next big social channel!