Snap Chats: this week in Snapchat? news
Snap Chats: August 19
Every week we share our top picks on everything Snapchat. If you're interested in joining the Mish Guru community you can sign up here.
Word on the Street: Snapchat is acquiring the social life-organizing app Vurb for a reported $200m
The Chat: Vurb is a visual search app that delivers local lifestyle suggestions direct to your mobile, then helps you organise them with a simple card-based system. Just download the app, select your lifestyle preferences, turn on location and start discovering what’s nearby. Last week, Snapchat announced it would be acquiring Vurb for a cool couple of million. So, what could we expect from this acquisition in the near future?
For starters, Vurb’s card-based system is very similar to the new direction for Snapchat Discover, so it’s relatively easy to see where Vurb’s content might fit. Similarly, Snapchat’s already heavily involved in the geo-location space, so it’s also not hard to imagine them incorporating more direct response ad products into it.
From the user’s perspective, Vurb could make Snapchat account discovery much, much easier. One of the primary criticisms of Snapchat has been for limited user discovery due to non-existent in-app search. Vurb’s technology could provide a solution to this. There’s also the potential tie in with the new product scan capability we talked about last week to find nearby recommendations. This could be huge for local businesses.
Long story short, we’re pretty excited to see how this relationship plays out. Read what our mates at TechCrunch had to say about it below, or download Vurb from the App store and try it out for yourself.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/15/snapsearch/
Meanwhile, In Social Media: Snapchat’s ad products are out-performing Facebook’s
The Chat: Snapchat just announced that approximately two-thirds of its ads are viewed with the sound on. To put that into perspective, Facebook’s average is about 15%, so Snapchat’s numbers are high by comparison. But volume isn’t the only thing that could be working in Snapchat’s favour. Read the full piece and discover why else consumers are listening.