It’s no secret now that the hottest social app of the past 2 years has been Snapchat. Lots of people laughed when it was first introduced in 2011 thinking it was just for a bunch of kids wanting to exchange sex oriented disappearing content.
Now these same guys who laughed back then are looking at the stats going: “Holy Snap, what the hell just happened here!”. With more than 100 million daily ACTIVE users and 10 billion of daily video views, Snapchat is definitely becoming the ultimate micro video storytelling platform.
Why it’s so popular?
It’s The Anti-Social Media
Forget the social graph, forget the fancy face recognition algorithms. Think about it, Facebook is only 12 years old and their social platform model is already being challenging by younger, “cooler” platforms that don’t want to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” In fact, Snapchat has decided to go in a totally different direction by not giving the option to like, share or comment publicly. Instead, it wants you to have 1–1 conversations with other snapchatters through a multitude of options like replying to a sequence in a Story with a private text, video, emoji or image. Again, it makes the platform unique and very focussed on establishing a true two way conversations.
Right Time For Video
The combination of faster data rate transfer (thanks to LTE mobile networks) and the rise of the mobile first world has catapulted video into the mainstream mobile web and has made sharing video over the air very easy. Being a video oriented platform, Snapchat is right there in the middle of the bullseye in terms of having the right app, with the right functions/possibilities, at the right time.
Your Mom And You Boss Aren’t On Snapchat… (yet).
Sure, some cool moms and bosses are (and they should), but overall this is a platform where millennials can share stuff they wouldn’t necessarily share on mass social media platform like Facebook and Twitter. Actually stats shows that 30% of the Snapchat users use it because their parents aren’t on it.
So. What This Has To Do With Business And Brands?
These are only 3 reasons why Snapchat is so popular and why Brands should learn how to use it in a engaging way. If you start reverse engineering people’s attention and look at the data, you will find that micro video storytelling is definitely here to stay and that people are willing to spend more and more time with this form of content. In fact, US Adults Spend more than 5.5 Hours with Video Content Each Day.
I think there is definitely a huge opportunity for large and small businesses to learn how to play the game and to be there first. Think about it, if you are a small local business, this could be a very powerful tool to share cool stories about the neighborhood you are doing business in or give people a behind the scenes access to whatever industry you are in. At the end of the day, if you provide value, entertainment and give a reason to people to follow and interact with you, this could become a very efficient way to attract and get to know customers.
So start producing content made for the real time world that will get you closer to your audience. This could lead to many opportunities you haven’t event thought about. And don’t worry we’re all trying to figure it out all together and that’s what makes it even more exciting!
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Cheers!
