Why Facebook Chasing Snapchat Strategy is Working
Facebook has not been shy about taking more than a bit of inspiration from Snapchat. It’s tested a Snapchat clone called “Messenger Day” that allowed users to share photos and videos with friends with filters and stickers added to them. It launched Instagram Stories, which are live compilations of content that disappear after 24 hours on Instagram—a carbon copy of Snapchat Stories. Most recently, it started allowing users to send ephemeral Direct Messages to close friends. Sound familiar?
Public to Personal
Instead of being a leader, Facebook’s decided to take a fast follower approach. Snapchat saw two things coming that Facebook is just catching up with across its properties from Messenger to Facebook to Instagram.
First, people have shifted their preferences from public to private sharing. Teens have come of age at a time when what you post online can have real world ramifications. Snapchat was an answer to that, offering messages sent to a select few friends that disappear after a set period of time. Facebook has pushed forward with Messenger, a one-to-one messaging platform. The bottom line is Facebook has seen that its News Feed is where people want to share less-and-less. Instead, they want to share privately with a select few.
Second, people have cut back on the content they create. Instead, they’re opening Facebook and Instagram to consume the content of others—a trend Facebook calls context collapse. But Facebook relies on the content of its users to keep people coming back and interested. Snapchat dealt with this by putting creation at the center. When you open the app, you’re in the camera and invited to start sharing. For its part, Facebook and Instagram have been pushing for users to live broadcast, going so far as to launch a TV campaign, to encourage users to create.
Snapchat latched onto these trends early, and now Facebook’s playing catch-up. That may actually work perfectly for them.
Fewer Reasons to Leave
Integrating Snapchat-like features on Instagram (and Messenger for that matter) has proven to be Facebook’s go-to strategy in taking on Snapchat. It wants to give users, as well as brands, access to Snapchat-like features to prevent them from going elsewhere.
These new features aren’t new, but they are new where brands are most active. So it takes features brands have wanted to experiment with and puts them on a platform in which they’re already present, seeing results from and comfortable with.
Across its suite of apps (primarily Facebook, Messenger and Instagram), Facebook has accumulated the users, which in turn, attracted the brands. The missing piece as of late has been the innovation in ways of communicating with those users, something Snapchat has been doing successfully. Now, Facebook is giving brands the tools to communicate with users in new and interesting ways without having to build up a presence and learn a new platform. Why push to experiment with Snapchat before the business is ready when the tools to engage users in new and interesting ways are available where the brand is already active?
Facebook’s and Instagram’s new features like ephemeral direct messaging do little to push the space forward from the perspective of innovation. They do, however, make it easier for brands to just continue to invest in their existing presences on Instagram instead of pursuing Snapchat.
That being said, Snapchat has clearly shown that it is the platform pushing the space forward with new forms of communication. Facebook will need to figure out how it can stop playing catch-up with Snapchat and start being a leader once again because as Snapchat grows in users and gets an influx of cash from its upcoming IPO, copying features won’t be enough.