What makes Snapchat so popular and what can SuperOne learn from it?
If you try to explain the concept of Snapchat to someone who’s unsure of what it is, this particular social media platform sounds pretty banal.
It’s best described as an app that allows you to send messages, photos, and videos to the followers of your account before they disappear after a short period of time.
So why is it the most popular social media platform in the US today? They say that true beauty is fleeting, but what really separates Snapchat from its competitor is even simpler. The platform is fundamentally about creating content you want to share.
It’s not about sitting back and passively absorbing the stuff that other people create Unlike Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, the first thing you see when you open Snapchat isn’t a massive feed of information. It’s a camera. Snapchat’s strategy is to encourage its users to create content to send to a friend, even if it’s just a series of goofy videos.
Tweaking the small things
When you pick up your phone and look at the screen, is it vertical or horizontal? It’s likely that 99% of people will say vertical, and Snapchat tapped into that. Before it launched in 2011, people mostly had to turn their phones sideways to view videos.
However, for people who primarily use their phones vertically (nearly all of us), creating and watching videos with your phone upright just makes more sense. Now Youtube and Periscope have followed suit, influenced by Snapchat.
Knowing the users
Statista reports that 77% of Snapchat users in the UK, for example, are aged between 18 and 24. The company knows this and has taken serious steps to protect this young demographic’s privacy.
Content on Snapchat is inherently private. Its servers are designed “by default” to delete most posted content immediately after being viewed. Once you see a snap, it evaporates. After a ‘Story’ runs for 24 hours, it’s also gone. That’s compelling for young people, who may not have learned to stay out of trouble on social media and find this the easiest way to do so. In short, its users feel safe.
What you see is what you get
Lastly, unlike Instagram where the visual content can seem fake, over glossy, and inauthentic, Snapchat is much less structured. There’s nothing to ‘like’ and it doesn’t foster a popularity contest. This transient nature of Snapchat convinces users that it’s fine to share content that is only temporarily interesting. It fits in with the speedy cultural shifts that Gen Zs experience.
There’s no sense here that you’re creating things for posterity. And with that notion sticking in the back of users’ minds, the result is content that seems more genuine than that found anywhere else.
Viewing Snapchat from a SuperOne perspective
In building its exciting new mobile gaming app, the team at SuperOne, are experts at learning from the successes and failures of countless apps in both the gaming and social media worlds.
What it sees in Snapchat is a platform that inherently understands its core market and serves them appropriately, and that’s an important message for SuperOne to keep in mind.
SuperOne aims to attract many of its playing members from the millennial generation and many features that drive the app — from its swipe left/swipe right gameplay to its network creation opportunities — are focused firmly on the things that millennials find appealing.
Even the notion of playing to win life-changing prizes, something that could help you buy an incredible house, go on a dream round-the-world trip, pay off your student loans, inherently plays into the aspirations of millennials. Snapchat knows its audience; SuperOne does too.