Snapchat Ads may *slowly* kill your audience.
A Tale of Two Speeds & The Elephant in the Room
I’m a big fan of Snapchat. What they have done is incredible.
@TechCrunch just reported on their latest Advertising improvements — which will push them forward even further, potentially to an IPO.
That said…
It’s time to address the elephant in the room:
Snapchat has a deliverability problem. And it’s killing your audience.
Attention has become the most valuable currency in the media world, and critical to the success of any company.
That is partially why everyone is jumping on Snapchat.
Yet…
How fast do Snapchat Stories load from the people you follow?
3 seconds?
5 seconds?
Do they not load at all?
“It takes a while. What’s the big deal?”
Did you know that nearly half of web users will abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds? (source)
If your Snap doesn’t load quickly → people skip it → giving you false engagement metrics → that you use to drive your strategy.
What’s worse?
Longer term damage to your Snapchat brand.
Sorry, Gary Vaynerchuk (GaryVee’s Snapchat) — I tried to load your story today and it took 17 seconds seconds on a broadband wifi connection from SF.
I skipped your story. I just wasn’t patient enough to wait for it to load.
Is your content good? It’s great.
Is that fair to you? No.
…and it’s time we start talking about it.
Did you know that 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again. (source)
Every Snapchat account is like its own website and media company.
If people have a negative experience with your account, all it takes is a simple swipe to skip your content.
Too many consistent swipes, and your followers learn a behavior that makes you irrelevant.
And if you’re on Snapchat and post a lot of content daily, especially video, I find myself being less and less compelled in consuming your content — simply in anticipation that it will take too long to load.
Sorry. It’s not your actual content. It’s the deliverability of your content.
Will Snapchat Ads make this even worse?
Possibly.
As Snapchat works to monetize, what is clear is that they’ll focus on delivering high value to advertisers. That content will be on the superhighway for deliverability. Instant Ads that they just announced is just one example.
What is unclear is if loading non-paying user’s content will be prioritized in the app. Let’s hope it’s not going to turn into rush hour on 101.
Snapchat may be hot right now — but if your content isn’t loading to your followers, you may as well as be on Friendster.
Is there hope?
Hopefully the Snapchat Team is working on this. (Remember the Twitter #FailWhale? Haven’t seen that in years. Good work there, Twitter.)
Once we’re honest and transparent about the loading issue - we can then work together on solutions and approaches to address.
For example:
What Snapchat Users can do:
- K.I.S.S. — Keep it Short and Snappy. Longer snaps seem to take more time to load so use a combination of photo and video to help decrease load time.
- Start with photo snaps to tease your Story. Use photos to start telling/teasing your Story, and then add videos later to get the viewer more invested for content to load.
- Quality connections (and content) win. Create connections with people (and reply to their snaps) and they’ll be more likely to seek you out and wait for your content to load.
What Snapchat could do:
- Provide data for Snaps/Stories Loaded — not just viewed — so we can properly evaluate the conversion rate and quality of our content.
- Provide transparency on Snapchat’s platform status and help the community know what is being worked on (See Facebook example https://developers.facebook.com/status/)
- Hire people to help scale faster. (If you’re an Engineer, here’s Snapchat Careers page ;)
Let’s do it together.
It is difficult to keep up with the demand of a fast-growing website/app/platform — especially in the case of Snapchat’s 150M+ daily active users.
Once we’re open about the deliverability of Snapchat content — then, we can truly work together on solutions, approaches and metrics that provide a better Snapchat experience to all.
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…and add me on Snapchat :)
