Where other platforms rely on permanence and the concreteness of their posts, Snapchat throws all that out the window and favors a more disposable "live life in the moment" approach to its platform. But how does this affect marketers?
Founded in 2011, Snapchat was marketed towards users as a disappearing picture app, allowing them to post and share pictures and chats that would disappear after a certain amount of set time. This was unique among most of the major social media platforms at the time because as the old saying goes "nothing truly get deleted on the internet" was completely thrown out the window with this app. Now people would no longer have to sift through days and days of posts to see what they wanted because they physically couldn't.
When it comes to marketing, snapchat is most effective with younger demographics. It is interesting to me that even 11 years after it's launch, the majority of app's user base hasn't grown with it. It started with college students, but with time the majority of users stayed in that demographic. It's limited-time marketing style forces attention to be drawn. With the attention span of young people being shorter than ever, marketers that use Snapchat have enabled themselves to latch onto that short span and use it to their advantage. Though with the algorithm change in recent years, business get less attention from people unless they follow them directly. I find this interesting because although Snapchat randomizes what ads and corporate content show up on people's feeds, it is still a highly effective marketing tool.
Although many have begun to copy some of it's successful features such as Stories, Snapchat still reigns supreme as the disappearing yellow and white flower amongst a sea of eternal data.
You make an interesting point, and one I did not think of, that the apps user base hasn't really moved with the app. Do you think people "grow out" of their Snapchat phase?
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