Snapchat vs. Facebook and the fight for the future of communication
With 2016 being just over I’d like to take a look back at what has been a very interesting year for communication in general but especially visual communication with the competing networks Snapchat, Instagram & Messenger.
Our communication changes
Before we dive into the main part of this article just a quick recap on the “recent” shifts in communication. Facebook showed its own change it went through since 2004. We started with text, moved on to photo and therefore a more visual communication, now video is slowly trying to be our most visual communication — but there is VR & AR on the horizon (with still years to come but the most immersive experience). Besides the fact that we are better at understanding visual communication (based on biology) there is an obvious second dependency:
This shift is clearly tied to technology and how it evolves. With faster phones, better cameras and faster internet connections what used to be more complex forms of communication become omni-present and available to everyone. Emojis influence text-based communication, apps like Instagram and Snapchat change visual-based communication.
Snapchat vs. Instagram
This brings us to the main part of this article since everything written here is based on our changes is communication.
Since we as humans are very visual it shouldn’t be such a big surprise why social networks based on this idea are very popular and popularity is still rising — YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, WeChat, … you name it! A lot has already been written about the battle between the two, so I won’t go into all the details → just click here, here, here or here.
Instagram has been the king in the field for a long time with the biggest community — now more than 600 million. Its focus on trends like retro-filters, constant high-quality polished content over the years and support from its mother Facebook has clearly pushed the network and made it the most popular visual platform in this field.
Snapchat however has always been about capturing (disappearing) moments, just like we have them in real life — in its raw form. From there it added video functionality and introduced various other features like Stories, Chat, Live and more. It has however always been circling around its core.
If you compare this to Instagram and its recent developments like introducing its own “Stories” section with ability to doodle on them etc. you can already see a change in favor of attracting other users as well.
One of the distinguishing factors between the two though is engagement (compared to community size) of daily active users (DAUs), which is a much more interesting KPI than monthly active users (MAUs).
- Instagram: ø of 95 million photos and videos published per day by 300 million daily active users
- Snapchat: ø of 9.000 snaps shared per second, ø of 10 billion videos viewed every day by 150 million daily active users
Just to give you a comparison: Facebook’s 1.18 billion daily active users watch approx. 8 billion videos per day — not bad for Snapchat.
Snapchat vs. Instagram vs. Messenger
Surprisingly through, in this context nothing has been written about Facebook’s second major platform — Messenger. But with its recent changes and updates I think it is fair to discuss Messenger here as well.
We already know that Instagram offers similar to 1:1-copied functionalities to attract Snapchat’s user groups. Messenger however has recently started to become another copycat of Snapchat as many reports have shown (here, here, here) — including a “Story”-like feature, which is also offered by Instagram.
I am not sure about the (competition) strategy of the two Facebook-owned platforms Messenger and Instagram (and even WhatsApp!) within the company’s own product line. Both take on a lot of Snapchat features, still Messenger is a bot and service platform as well.
However it becomes obvious that Facebook is trying really hard to appeal to a younger (and very engaged) audience again with recent reports showing that younger users leave Facebook for Snapchat and constantly growing DAUs for Snapchat.
Scale over originality?!
The media is often taking a bat at Facebook (and its products) for blatantly copying Snapchat’s features after it reportedly failed to buy the network in 2013.
Although Snapchat was mostly “first” with the rollout of its features (Disappearing content, Stories, Discover, …) and its totally different path/ strategy than Facebook’s it doesn’t ensure success in the 21st century. Just look at Apple, who was hardly ever the company that introduced something new, just better.
It will be very interesting to watch Snapchat in the years 2017 and 2018 and how they can stack up against a giant like Facebook — especially with Snap’s planned IPO for Q1 2017. If the IPO does go well Snap will have a lot more money to invest into its core products and may focus on increasing its number of DAUs globally even though Evan Spiegel, Snap’s CEO, said that he’d rather have a much more engaged small user base than a big not-so-engaged one (compare the engagement numbers from above again!).
Still Facebook’s user base is the biggest of any network out there and this brings one very important factor to the table: scalability of features.
Yes, Facebook does copy from Snapchat a lot — recently copying “geofilters”, one of Snapchat’s very popular features — and rolls them out across different platforms; Messenger (and Facebook itself) in this case. There are no official DAU statistics for Messenger available, yet people guess it’s around 500–600 million DAUs.
Top this with the 1.18 billion DAUs of Facebook and you can instantly see the advantage of scalability.
It will be very interesting to follow this battle between Snapchat and Facebook. Maybe both will stay here, maybe one will vanish. I guess the next few months will show an important direction, especially with Snap’s IPO.
Anything to add? Comments are welcome here or via michaellintner on Twitter.
