Snapchat — 5 Reasons It’s The Future of Collaborative Communications

Are you on Snapchat? It’s the hot app right now — regularly in the top five most popular apps in Apple’s and Google’s U.S. app stores — and has taken off in the Millennial and younger set. It’s part of that whole group of new communications — ephemeral texts, photos and more.

Snapchat is so hot that Bloomberg made it a cover story, Wall Street Journal and New York Times cover the app — and how to use it — and if you see your children making goofy faces at their phone, they’re likely on Snapchat sending messages to friends.

Plus, as noted by Re/Code, 64 percent of U.S. smartphone users between the ages of 18 and 24 used Snapchat in late 2015 and in the key 18-to-34-year-old demographic, it’s second only to Facebook on time-spent per month.

Personally, I have been using Snapchat for the past year. It’s how I keep in touch with my two girls in college. They don’t use email. So it’s the platform I know they use, and will get back to me. We Snapchat multiple times through the day (pics, snaps, messages).

Meet Snapchat 2.0

But with the launch of Chat 2.0, Snapchat has opened up into a whole new paradigm: it’s become the future of collaboration. Before you roll your eyes, think it through and then play with the app. The new Snapchat Chat has brought all that you need for a truly collaborative conversation into its platform: video/images, audio, text, drawing and symbols.

It’s done all that with the launch of video notes (respond to a comment with a facial response), audio notes (shot voice snippets for on-the-go responses), multiple images with mark-up ability (draw, text, filter) and image sharing while video or audio chatting. The ability to go from audio to video calls, and interact and collaborate — even if it’s just friends interacting with friends — is the new collaboration that we are all striving for right now in the corporate world.

The 5 Reasons

Here are the five reasons I see Snapchat 2.0 as a leading indicator of collaborative communications.

1. Fast conversations. As we see with Slack, join.me, and other tools, it’s about fast and easy communications. It’s not about getting lost in an email thread, complicated hurry-up-and-wait downloads or the like, but being able to participate in right-now conversations with immediate responses and reactions.

2. Simplicity. While many people might find Snapchat confusing, you just have to watch the clips that the company sends out — or watch the full demos — and you are able to start. While it’s not intuitive, it is easy to use once you know the “language” and is simple.

Even the tutorials aren’t called tutorials, but just show up as Snaps from Snapchat that make you want to watch and learn what’s next; it’s just part of the app. It’s the future of app and product education — it’s disguised as just part of the program, not as a tutorial. So you watch, you learn, and then you use (simple, right?), but if they called it a tutorial… no one would click or watch.

3. Multi-mediums. Chat 2.0 isn’t just stuck on one medium, but it embraces it all in one app. You have text, image, video, animated graphics and the ability to draw on pictures, and switch between the formats and mediums. It works for everyone’s different form of learning — from visual to written to audio content, with different visual content and different messages.

4. Secure. With the update, Snapchat has clarified that it only temporarily saves snaps submitted to Live stories and deletes everything else. It’s the ephemeral nature of Snapchat that what-you-don’t-want-shared-won’t-be-shared. As online collaboration grows for businesses, it must be safe and secure. And it is companies like Vera, who have come out with services that encrypt and protect data across users, devices, platforms, that are helping enterprise messaging stay secure.

5. Always On. As Snapchat is mobile-only, it’s the always-on and always-available focus of communications and collaboration. But with any mobile-focused app, it’s also about being available on your terms. It’s the beauty of mobile — you might be available, but you don’t need to be on. And to be collaborative, both parties need to participate. The mobile always-on means being there and present when you’re both available, at any time.

Changing How We Work

And while the debate about the Millennial worker is at full-force, the reality is that the tools they use are helping change work for the better for all generations. That includes the remote working movement, the flex-time discussions, and how they communicate.

And how they communicate is mobile. Messaging apps are rising, and people are looking for alternatives to email and other legacy tools. Corporate messaging will have to emulate the new tools and behavior to bring the best in collaboration and simplicity to its users. The future of communications is collaboration, and it’s training the future users with Snapchat.