Is Snapchat All It’s Hyped Up To Be?
Snapchat has been lauded as the hottest social messaging service out there. It’s unique, it’s popular, and it’s at the fingertips of Gen Y and Gen Z. I use it myself, and it’s a fun app.
But I think the hype around it may be temporary. It’s true that Snapchat has seen high growth and mass-market adoption — but it’s also true that it’s one of the smaller players in the social messaging space.
When we take a look at social messaging apps we see the biggest services like WhatsApp, WeChat, and LINE driving amazing growth. WhatsApp just reached the 1 billion user mark this week. WeChat and LINE are giant messaging platforms in APAC and only growing. And I haven’t even yet mentioned Messenger, Facebook’s other social messaging service, which is nearing the 1 billion user mark as well.
Among the top downloaded social and messaging apps, Snapchat is beaten out by WhatsApp and Messenger in nearly every market on both iOS and Android, according to data from AppAnnie. In reality, it’s not competing that well against other social and messaging apps. I can only see this gap widening in the next six months.
Snapchat’s success is written more in its media buzz than its size. And that makes sense for now because it has an amazing story. It’s the startup that declined a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook. It relies on temporary content in a day and age where most other services make whatever content is sent through them available indefinitely.
But things just aren’t adding up when it comes to long term growth and stability. Unless Snapchat evolves in a dramatic way, I’m having a hard time thinking all of the attention it’s getting is deserved. With its user figures not even being released, it could be on a trajectory to stall.
Snapchat is surviving right now because of its media buzz, but it won’t be here much longer if it doesn’t mature. It’s simply not as big as other social messaging platforms. It’s not very brand-friendly, according to many marketers I’ve spoken with who find that advertising on the platform requires giving up a lot of control of content. It doesn’t even offer the same value proposition and is rather somewhere in between a messaging app and a media hub — while not excelling at either. (The messages vanish, and the media content isn’t easy to search or discover.)
What Snapchat offers right now is a fun, trendy way to consume news. But won’t people grow out of this fad and back to more normalized content?
Snapchat could be a serious threat to other social networks if — and only if — it decided to focus on one thing: real discovery. By this I don’t mean what Snapchat calls discovery in its Discover tab. What’s lacking on Snapchat are actual discovery features for searchable content. The Discover tab is a great feature for publishers to create snackable content, videos, and articles, but this type of curation can’t be the future of consuming content and thus the future of journalism.
Snapchat has come a long way — and perhaps a lot farther than any of us could have predicted. But let us not forget that Snapchat is not alone in the social messaging space. Innovation by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and others could make a lot of Snapchat’s value prop obsolete. In order to be a serious contender in the social space and keep itself in the eye of the media, Snapchat needs to offer its users more substantive content features and decide what exactly it wants to be. It’s a great platform for now, but if it doesn’t evolve, it might just vanish, too.
Marketing. Effectiveness. Meditation.
8 年The comment section here... good read in itself! :) I think the interface itself needs to evolve if it wants to attract a wider audience. It might be fun and intuitive for people who just got their first smartphone, but the huge mass inbetween has been taught to use Google search, Facebook and crappy websites with buttons. I took several "learning sessions" from my wife's 12yo niece to learn Snapchat's features. But the motivation was not "natural", more driven by professional interest. And I've seen the same reaction among many. I think they have now improved the first tutorial somewhat. And I actually disagree with some comments above claiming Snapchat doesn't form a habit, I think it has great stickiness. You're instantly inclined to send a snap in return once you get one, which generates a loop of engagement, unlike in Facebook or anywhere else really.
Award Winning User Experience Strategist
9 年I think this is an interesting piece. But, I don't really think you have 'got' Snapchat, Inc. when describing it. For one, the articles makes some sense if you read it as a marketing tool or a vital piece in a content strategy i.e. the 'Discover' comments etc. But, big but, Snapchat never has and never will be recognised for it's content (how can it? It disappears within ten seconds!). What it is recognised for is it's mechanism for accessing content - that was the companies clever USP to begin with and what it should be now. It seems that in the push to evolve the platform into something that can make money (i.e. an ad platform) the company, and marketing/comms/technical people within the industry, have lost the understanding of what made Snapchat popular to begin with. The clever mechanism that allowed you to send content with rapid expiry dates, it made it fun and very appealing to younger generations. They started to believe it was about the content that lasted 10 sec's that made it a great 'social platform' and not the idea that it was the fact that you were sending something that would only last ten seconds that really captured people's attention! Of course the content is important but in this case, it's the CONTEXT in which the content is being received that is even more important. So, in relation to your piece - it won't vanish, because there is an audience for a solution that only allows content to be seen for ten seconds. It won't also ever reach the numbers of the more generic 'competitor's' because of the exact mechanism that gives it an audience. It's in a catch 22. It's biggest danger right now is itself, and the company's ever blurring understanding of why it exists in the first place, in it's hunt for revenue.
Owner at Blue Room Books Publishing
9 年No.
Global Digital Transformation & Strategic Innovation executive | Former CMO | AI & Emerging Tech Evangelist Driving high-impact digital transformation, AI-powered solutions, and strategic content for sales | EX-L’Oreal
9 年I actually feel that it is precisely because it is not brand friendly and has ephemeral content that millennials are still on it. However their economic and content model defiantly needs working on.
Director - Creative Director
9 年I feel like you should use Snapchat and know how it works before writing an article, but IDK, that's just me.