Mark my words Snapchat will dominate the social media landscape for a long time. It doesn’t matter if the stock $SNAP goes up or down.Why will Snapchat dominate? If you have a teenager in your house take a minute and watch them on Snapchat. I have a 13 year-old son and his day (besides school) is 30% gaming and 70% Snapchat. He uses Snapchat like many 40 year olds use Facebook. It’s a source of news, communication and entertainment. It’s interesting to watch him talk about the news (although it’s a little focused on celebrities), watch him communicate with all his friends (I’m totally jealous because he has about 200 of them and I can barely get 15 friends to follow me) and watch him laugh at various filters.
If at this point you already know why Snapchat will dominate then you can stop reading. If you don’t, read on…
Reason #1 Branding
Snapchat is the major brand among 13-20 year-olds as the social media channel of choice. Imagine what this brand will be like in 10 to 20 years. Branding is key to any company’s sustainability. If you have an established brand, a company can make mistakes and still stay relevant and Snapchat is already way ahead of the curve.
Reason #2 Ease of Use vs. Clunky
Snapchat has done an excellent job of putting news, communication and fun in one easy to use mobile app. With a few swipes a user can get to any of these three things very quickly. Stories, Filters and Adding Friends can all be done in seconds. Facebook in 2017 is like a huge clunky battleship next to Snapchat with multiple apps and many desktop components.
Are there still hazards ahead for Snapchat? Of course.
Monetization is a huge factor for Snapchat. Case in point, Twitter. Wall Street is always going to look for revenue and earnings. I’m not worried about this, Snapchat has many ways to monetize. For example, Geofilters and Sponsorship advertising. I believe the advertising sources are still endless seeing that Snapchat still hasn’t even cashed in on small business advertising. Plus there’s a huge component of revenue in the form of users. Look at Snapchat Spectacles… at $129 per pair they are sitting on a goldmine. With 158 million daily active users worldwide if everyone bought a pair, well you do the math.
The conclusion is that Snapchat saw the future and decided that instead of being a branch of Facebook they could dominate a whole new segment of users.
What do you think? Do you agree?
