We Work Exclusively With 18–22 Year Olds. We’re Not On Snapchat. Here’s Why.

Some background: The Black Sheep is a college marketing and media company whose audience targeted at 18–22 year olds (plus, our on-the-ground staffs are made up entirely of college students). On the media side, our elevator pitch is, “We’re kinda like The Onion for college kids.”

We, in fact, did have Snapchat in late 2016 and early 2017, and we had 40 schools (read: accounts) produce one story per week. Students would often times put 3+ hours into these stories between planning, pitching, and executing. But even at schools where we had very established social channels, it was difficult to get people to add us on Snapchat.

All in all, it was a huge amount of effort for very little, if any, payoff.

Fast-forward to early 2018, and Snapchat drops an unpopular update that draws the ire of millions of its users, including its most popular user, Kylie Jenner. A few days later, we call a meeting in our windowless conference room to figure out next steps and whether to reinvest our social media efforts back in Snapchat, or double-down on Instagram.

Or so it seemed.

In order to back up our assumption so we don’t make an ass out of you and me, we conducted a pretty legitimate survey. Here’s how we conducted our survey and some of our results:

Our method:

• The survey was around 10 questions long depending on whether users answered that they used it less, the same, or more (0.6% of respondents said they used Snapchat more after the update).
• It was distributed in ~54 collegiate “class of” Facebook groups across the country, whose members ranged from 1,000–25,000 total members.
• In addition, we shared on posts on The Black Sheep’s Twitter accounts, whose users totaled ~230,000 at the time.
• The median age of those surveyed was 19.75.
• In total, we had 858 responses, with confidence level of 99%, and error margin of 1.92 (based on our estimate of 20 million college students in the U.S.)

Some important findings:

A majority (57.1%) of those surveyed said they they used it less than they previously did. The rest used it about the same (that tiny sliver are those who began using it more):

Those who responded that they “use it less” (493 users) were asked how much less they use Snapchat…

…and a majority of responders added they use it less because it was “harder to navigate.”

Those who “use it less” were asked:

If we were on Snapchat, we would have been a user’s “friend.”

And those who “use if differently, but the same amount” were asked similarly:

This whole study solidified our Instagram usage over our Snap usage for us, as well as some beliefs we had about Instagram, including the following:

• Snapchat doesn’t let you build a following as easily as Instagram (we would’ve been a user’s “friend,” and the challenge is getting them to add us).
• Having that publicly viewable, concrete number of followers is easier to sell to advertisers.
• Instagram offered analytics and insights from the get-go (as does its parent, Facebook), and are constantly improving that area for publishers and brands. Snapchat does not.
• Instagram ads and boosting enables you to get your content or profile into other people’s feeds. Snapchat does not offer that (yet).
• Snapchat’s daily active users slowed by nearly half from Q4 2017 to Q1 2018, compared to the same time the year prior. As of September 2017, Instagram had nearly three times as many daily active users compared to Snapchat.
• For us, we can be logged into multiple Instagrams at once, which is helpful for us because we have several dozen school accounts we oversee and manage.
• Everything we can do on Snapchat, we can do on Instagram (and do it better).

Our target demographic responded that Snapchat was still one of their more preferred social media platforms, and it will still remain another outlet for publishers to publish their content. But, we don’t need to be in a place they love because of the personal setting it gives them with their actual friends. They didn’t join Snapchat to keep tabs on brands.

As most small (and oft-feeling strapped) media publishers could agree, there’s only so much time in a day and resources at our disposal.

Why waste it on a platform who simply pales in comparison to Instagram?