What Came First, the Snap or the Paradigm Shift?

I used to think Snapchat was irrelevant. I thought its early adoption by Gen Z was owed to the ease of sharing illicit snaps and I wrongly assumed that with its glory days already behind it, Snapchat wouldn’t succeed in transforming its user base into a revenue-driving platform for businesses. I was wrong.

Snapchat’s founder Evan Spiegel got my (and the world’s) attention when he decided to rebuff Facebook’s 3 Billion dollar acquisition offer. Under his leadership, two important factors which differentiate Snapchat from the rest of the social pack have emerged:

1. Spiegel has cultivated a new paradigm from the evolving nature of how we communicate: Mobile has become an extension of our mouth: we relay video snippets, images and short messages hundreds of times a day. In Snapchat, Spiegel’s packaged this paradigm into an app, offering the immediacy, authenticity and informal exclusivity new-age communicators desire. This is all made ultra-powerful by the looming 24-hour time frame: if you don’t catch it the first time around, it’s gone forever. The cultivated fear of missing a moment is very powerful.
2. Snapchat’s emphasis on protecting its user base from advertising: On any given day, the app reaches 41% of all 18 to 34 year-olds in the United States. Unlike its competitors, Snapchat has successfully ensured its user base isn’t bombarded with impersonal content. How? Snapchat notoriously offers little to no analytics to its advertisers. But due to it’s “cool” reputation and because it’s a direct path into Gen Z’s frame of focus, companies must comply with Snapchat’s rules if they want to play. The result? Brands are forced to get creative, and deliver content that users deem worthy of sharing. In effect, they get more engagement. The careful way in which Snapchat has slowly and cautiously invited advertisers onto the app has created a space where users are self promoting the ads, many without realizing they are. The playful filters never feel invasive.

Spiegel has cultivated an app that helps propel the shift of a new communications paradigm to new heights, which millions of people are using up to 10 billion times a day. While there have been great strides this year, it took a while for the advertising world to catch up, so you’re left with an app that has transferred much of the power to the consumer.

Is there a unifying feature of the major social platforms that have become vital tools to communicate with other people? Why did I add Snapchat into my company’s social media plan alongside Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook? The proliferation of the different social networks and why they continue to grow their user bases has taught me a deep lesson about how people communicate and how it’s evolved in the digital age. Fundamentally, there have always been different capacities through which you can connect with other people. We used to consult the radio for global news while we wrote letters to our loved ones, which evolved into watching network television and talking on the telephone. Today, we login to Facebook to see what’s going on in the world, and receive live streams of one’s days — in images and videos — all on one highly personalized, handheld device. Each medium encourages very different types of sharing experiences and content, often without consideration.

To understand the uniqueness of what Snapchat provides, let’s compare it to another favorite millennial app: Instagram. The photo sharing app’s early beginning had some similarities to Snapchat. It started off as a location-based sharing app, but the founders quickly shifted focus when they discovered their user-base was glomming on to the photo posting and sharing feature of the app almost exclusively. Simplicity remained the focus: in the final version you could post and share a photo in three clicks, prompting an unscripted snapshot of day to day life.

But users have taken it and shaped it in a much different way. The first noticeable thing about the most followed instagram feeds is the high quality of the photos. The images that perform (receive the highest engagement based on likes and comments) are often shot on a DSLR, and edited either using professional software or other photo editing apps like VSCO. Influencers have taken this to an entirely new level, with the most successful ones hiring teams of stylists, photographers and publicists but also profiting up to $25000 per post through sponsorships. A key component of the content shared there is about very carefully posed, put together snapshots.

Snapchat encourages an entirely different type of interaction amongst its user base. Because the content disappears in 24 hours, there is no pressure to post anything that has been airbrushed, It encourages authenticity — and that’s what makes it interesting and relevant. Also different from Instagram and Facebook, there is no way to upload videos into Snapchat, they must be taken right from a user’s phone. These small difference cause a paradigmatic shift in the way content is then experienced by users and what gets shared. The result is a visceral, day-to-day glimpse into the lives of just about anyone, from the Kardashians to your Gen-Z cousin who spends a lot of time filming himself dabbing.

Snapchat is here to stay. Your brand’s success advertising on it, but furthermore on social media as a whole depends on how well your team understands the inherent differences in the way people use the platforms to communicate.