Don’t Use Snapchat Yet? You’re Missing Out

Speaking with most of my friends in their mid thirties, I get a dirty look when I ask them do they use Snapchat. “The thing that teenagers use to send naked pictures?” and “What’s the point of sending a message that disappears?” are the two main answers I get. These comments signal the two main issues Snapchat has, a discovery problem and a reputation problem.

Once you start actively using snapchat, these problems slowly dissipate. When it comes to messaging, snapchat is a fantastic evolution of online communication. For those unfamiliar with snapchat etiquette, users typically take a picture or video and send it to another user, who can view it for a short duration before it disappears, typically for 10 seconds. The sender can also annotate the image with text of different colours and styles as well as drawing on top of the image with their finger using different colours. I admit, it sounds a bit juvenile, but as soon as you start using it the power and addictiveness become apparent.

Remember when we all used to send those jokes and funny pictures by email 15 years ago? Remember when we stopped doing that and started putting them on Facebook instead? Snapchat is the next step in this evolution. You can send funny pictures to your friends or post them to your story for the world to see. Content on your story lasts for 24 hours. You can re-live in-jokes among friends or document your life as a celebrity or a normal person with a series of 10 second images and videos. Where snapchat differs from previous platforms is that it amplifies existing social networks, it is an add-on to real life interactions. Additional features such as live chat and video calling all reinforce the person to person communication mission of Snapchat. As powerful as this is, to get the most out of it you need an existing network on snapchat to tap in to. This is the key to Snapchat’s discovery problem but one which will become decreasingly impactful as snapchat reaches critical mass.

The other main adoption barrier that faces Snapchat is its reputation problem. A key subset of Snapchat users in the early days were people that used the app to send inappropriate pictures to each other, probably encouraged by the short lifetime of the message. Naturally this usage grabbed headlines around the world and became the first impression a lot of people have of the app. As you might expect, Snapchat has been working hard to dispel these early impressions and improve its reputation. A recent large update introduced the discovery and live features. Selected content providers like Sky News, National Geographic, MTV, Cosmopolitan, Vox and BuzzFeed create publications of text, video and audio content delivered daily to you. The selection of providers continues to grow to meet all interests and serves as a great source of catchup news. You can now legitimacy see the day when your daily news roundup is consumed here and not in front of a tv at a specified time in the evening. This evolution is Snapchat’s first step in being taken seriously as a content delivery platform.

Snapchat’s second step into main stream news territory came last week in the wake of the terrible shooting in San Bernardino, California last week. Using content generated by users around the location of the shooting coupled with content from official sources, Snapchat delivered a story about the shooting to everyone in the US in more or less real time. This curation model has been used in various cities and at events by Snapchat in recent months such as at NFL games or occasions like Halloween and has proved very powerful and intriguing. The extension of this crowd sourced content around real time news content, albeit around the unfortunate circumstances in San Bernardino, heralds Snapchat’s entrance onto the big stage of social networks and marks its best attempt to date at defeating its reputation problem in my view. More details of Snapchat’s San Bernardino, California shooting news story can be found in this Forbes article.

Transforming itself from a core messaging app into a hub of information and news is a monumental challenge for any app. It has become way more than a gimmicky messaging app and let us not forget, at one time all we did on Facebook was poke people and play mafia wars. Now it has 1.55 billion monthly active users. It will be interesting to watch the progression as Snapchat continues to compete with Facebook and for our attention. Needless to say, with all this innovation, you’re definitely missing out if you don’t use it :-)