Ever the chaser of youth culture trend, MTV channel is now turning to ephemeral messaging app Snapchat to generate hype for its VMA nominations, after doing practically the same thing on Instagram and Vine last year. While still a desperate attempt by MTV to stay culturally relevant, this move to turn away from established social media channels and embrace the burgeoning messaging app does make perfect sense. By engaging Snapchat’s massive teen population base, MTV is reaching it core audience in their new digital habitat. As our previous white paper on messaging apps concluded, they are the new face of social media, and brands have to follow where their audience goes.
Tag: messaging
New App Blends Messaging With Music Sharing
Following the long and proud tradition of burning a mix-CD (or mix-tapes for those of you who lived through the 90s) for your crush to express your intense feeling through nothing but power ballads, a new messaging app, whimsically named “La-La”, is enabling it users to send song snippets—and song snippets only—to each other. So far, it features a decent selection of licensed music by mainstream artists. But if you want to send an obscure indie-rock gem to that cute hipster you know, the musical messaging app also lets you to browse through YouTube to clip out an audio for sending.
In the larger picture, this could be seen as the newest development in messaging apps’ continuous effort to differentiate their products. Marrying music sharing with OTT messaging seems like a good idea in theory, but how to further integrate the music industry into the mobile messaging ecosystem remains unclear. Given the positive responses that previous efforts such as Yo or Tango received, however, it is certainly interesting to see if such creative approaches could catch the fickle eyes of younger generations.
Snapchat’s New Geofilters Open Up New Oppotunities
Snapchat has been experimenting with location-based features for a while now, especially with “Our Story”, a publicly shared, geo-specific event album that they first tested at Electric Daisy Carnival and later at the recent Rio World Cup final. Now they are rolling out the new location-based photo filters, named Geofilters, to enable all Snapchatters to stamp their specific location (limited to NYC and L.A. at the moment) onto their photos with a simple swipe.
Unlike most messaging stickers, these geofilters are currently free to use, and Snapchat offer no comment on future plans around monetization. But if the heavily featured mouse-ears in Disneyland in the promo video is any indication, there would no doubt be room for brand integration and native advertising, potentially opening up a new revenue stream for the messaging apps to follow.
From ‘Like’ to Love: How Brands Can Woo Users on Messaging and Dating Apps
How can brands connect with dating app users?
Where audiences go, brands follow, especially when those audiences are young and hard to find on traditional media. As a result, several brands are experimenting with the best ways to reach people on messaging apps. As seen in the report, the combination of brands, messaging, and dating is creating some unusual results, as seen in the following examples.
Facebook Launches Messager App On iPad
After launching a separate app for messaging all your Facebook friends on smartphones several months back, Facebook is finally bringing the update to iPad, with all functionality in tact. As the social media conglomerate continues to solidify its presence in the fast-growing market of mobile messaging apps, it seems fit to disintegrate its messaging app from its flagship social media app, as its number of active users keeps declining. It is also a smart move for Facebook to start establishing itself on the tablet devices, since there’s no official iPad version of WhatsApp, another messaging app that Facebook owns, currently available for iPad. The bottom line is, Facebook is taking messaging apps seriously, and they are implementing it across all mobile platforms.
Snapchat’s ‘Our Story’ Could Be Revenue Driver
Snapchat is releasing “Our Story,” a new feature which lets people attending the same event contribute snaps to a collective story, viewable to the public. Debuting with the Electric Daisy Carnival, Our Story is a huge development that may be a source of revenue for Snapchat as it looks to monetize events. But with location services enabled and public viewing, could “Our Story” undermine Snapchat’s core product?
Snapchat Adds Chat and Video Calls
Most messaging apps have become all-in-one solutions, offering video calls, image sharing and even gaming, with the notable exception of Snapchat. Now the ephemeral messaging platform is widening its functionality, adding text chat with the ability to have a FaceTime-like video call if both users are online. These, of course, will be destroyed upon leaving the chat unless you use a save for later functionality on select messages. The addition of these features will likely boost engagement but will Snapchat lose some differentiation? Video calls are not saved by default on most services and text typically does not carry the same privacy concerns as images.
Monopolizing Attention: Could Facebook and WhatsApp Be Your Next Mobile Carrier?
News from WhatsApp continues to incite speculation around Facebook’s strategy for the platform: on April 7th, the company announced that it was partnering with mobile operator E-Plus to sell prepaid SIM cards. Starting at 10 euros a month, users can make voice calls, text, and access data, all via the WhatsApp interface. Essentially, this will make WhatsApp a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO)—a carrier that buys coverage from other mobile network operators, without owning the infrastructure.
This move fits with parent company Facebook’s pattern of experimentation in the mobile space. In April 2013, they launched the ill-fated “Facebook phone,” the HTC First, which dropped in price from $99 to $0.99 within a month of its release, ultimately being pulled from the market. This may have caused them to reassess their approach, as in August 2013, Facebook helped launched Internet.org, a consortium dedicated to bringing the Internet to consumers worldwide. As they noted in “Connecting the World from the Sky:”
“By working together with operators to drive awareness and demand for
internet services, and by collaborating on new models for access that decrease the cost of data, we think we can bring billions more people onto the internet over the next few years.”
Furthermore, Facebook has partnered with mobile operators in the Philippines and Paraguay to provide users with free access to their app.
Facebook and WhatsApp are clearly attempting to bring more people on their network, and once there, keep them within the ecosystem. The more touchpoints they have with users, the more valuable they are to advertisers. It’s not difficult to imagine Facebook giving away SIM cards in the US that exclusively access Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, for instance. The ecosystem also gives them more opportunities to introduce existing consumers to new features or upsell them—it’s a great opportunity for WhatsApp to test out their new voice feature.
The IPG Media Lab will continue to follow developments in the messaging space.
LG Appliances Integrate With Messaging App LINE
Yes, you heard it right. LG will be debuting LINE chat capabilities integrated into their smart appliances, so you can chat with your dishwasher or fridge. The partnership works to let users command their appliances within the popular messaging app, thereby embedding the internet of things into their daily routine. I chat with my friends letting them know I’ll be out of town in one thread and tell my washing machine that it should go into energy saving mode. It works a bit like Siri for text, interpreting commands using natural language processing.
The decision for LG to work with Line opposed to only a proprietary app, for instance, is an interesting one. Instead of creating new systems, LG is bringing itself into the products and service you already use, making them more natural and seamless.
WhatsApp Surpasses 400 Million Monthly Active Users
WhatsApp announced another major milestone today: on the heels of its October claim that it had hit 350 million active monthly users, it’s now announcing that it has surpassed the 400 million mark in the same category. It’s 50 million new users in two months, and 100 million new users in the past four months alone. Clearly, the number of people who aren’t active users but have downloaded the app is much higher, and may mean that WhatsApp is leading the charge in the third party messaging war, which, if the numbers are anything to go by, is very evidently picking up steam.
