Snapchat Snapshot
A few weeks ago, Snapchat released one of the hottest app updates yet, adding face lenses like heart eyes, tears and puking rainbows to videos and photos. A few days later, the update still had the internet going nutz and it’s time for me to explain why Snapchat is not only the best social media app out, it’s growing fast and will soon dominate the majority of our handheld use, if it’s not doing so already.
Snapchat was started in 2011 by three Stanford frat bros who later ended up in a lawsuit over exactly what you would expect from a group of bros whose business quickly grew to billion-dollar valuation.
In late 2013 Facebook offered Snapchat $3 billion in cash to sell their app which was soon countered by a $4 billion offer from Google. Despite some typical Silicon Valley bullying from Zuckerberg, Snapchat CEO Evan Speigel decided to wait it out and this past May, Snapchat was valued at $16 billion.
With the bubble filled to the brink, a billion isn’t much in Silicon Valley these days but growth rates say it all. Gathering data from Wikipedia, I dusted off Excel and graphed the valuation of Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat over time. Granted, Facebook was one of the first huge successes of the latest tech boom and had to do some trailblazing, but they’re always good to reference.
Calculating the approximate compound annual growth rate for each company gives you 22.8% for Facebook, 30.5% for Twitter and 354.7% for Snapchat. That’s huge.
In a world where we’re inundated with 10,000+ word thinkpieces like comments from strangers in passing, visuals are beating text. Twitter and Facebook both know this is happening, as we’ve all seen them both scramble to better display, for example, decade-old visual formats. Branding and journalism fields are following closely behind and media is about to get a lot more fun.
So, who is using Snapchat?
Besides the new lenses, why is Snapchat the best? After taking a photo or video, you tell the story.
Security features are easy to set and you know exactly who is viewing your snaps, also showing who screenshots and replays. The best part is snaps only live for 24 hours so your followers either see them or they don’t. During that timeframe, you can download your own snaps singularly or as a story video file.
Brands are all over Snapchat and discovery is key. As well as viewing dedicated programming from major worldwide media brands such as Vice and Daily Mail, live events are also featured, bringing you footage live from somewhere around the world for a 24-hour period.
And despite its initial unintentional branding as a sexting app, it is clearly being used for other purposes.
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