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: snapchat
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.
WeChat Introduces Ephemeral Messaging Feature
In what seems to be a growing trend in the messaging app space, WeChat announced new features that pull from the success of SnapChat. WeChat users will now be able to recall the message they’ve sent within two minutes by long-pressing the message and clicking ‘Unsend.’ The feature works on photos as well. The move is a big nod to the type of privacy and control that users have responded positively to on SnapChat and other apps; expect to see more similar moves like it in the near future.
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?
Messaging App Tango Launches Brand Channels
Today Tango, a messaging app with over 200 million users globally, launched a plug-and-play solution for brands called Channels. It functions similarly to a Facebook brand page– a user follows a channel and then can view content like photos and video within a news feed. Launch partners include Spotify, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Cheezburger, Dailymotion, and OK Go.
The fact that TechCrunch, an authority on emerging tech, is betting early on Tango and messaging apps is perhaps the best indication that this is a noteworthy opportunity for media owners and brands. As further proof: only two hours after launch, Spotify’s Tango channel already had close to 25,000 followers and over 2,000 likes and 450 comments on its morning playlist posting.
As we mentioned in our recent white paper on the messaging app space, Tango is in many ways an outlier compared to the competition. Unlike popular millennial chat apps like Kik and Snapchat, its demographic skews heavily towards 25-50+ and proves that messaging is a phenomenon impacting all age groups. With close to 70 million users in the US, Tango has a great audience that has already proven itself very receptive to interacting with games and music on the platform.
Tango is also arguably the most brand friendly of the messaging apps, and has found success with a native ad product leveraged by companies like Dunkin’ Donuts, eBay, Spotify and others to drive app installs. In all likelihood these ads will also become a popular way for brands to attract subscribers to Tango Channels in the future.
Channels are currently free for brands to set up, so for companies looking to experiment with messaging app marketing there’s little risk involved in this opportunity. For now Tango houses the channels tab at the top of every user’s newsfeed. Once you click into it, you can search five primary categories: Entertainment, News, Sports, Music, and Funny & Cute. To see the program in action for yourself, click here to download the app or watch the official Channels intro video.
Tinder Becomes More Like Snapchat
As Tinder tries to become more than just a “hookup app,” it’s looking to competitor Snapchat for ideas. Now, Tinder allows you to share “moments,” which are photos that expire after 24 hours, with everybody you’ve ever matched with. The idea is to draw users into the social features of sharing things wth new friends, rather than using it for merely swiping through people to meet up with. It’s a bit of a different outlook for Tinder, who are now competing with messaging apps as well as dating apps.
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.
Snapchat Takes On Messaging
Snapchat has become popular in large part because of its massive teen population base. Now, as teens as a demographic continue to shift towards third party messaging apps, Snapchat is expanding its platform to keep up. Snapchat today announced a new live video option that allows users to communicate as long as they are holding down the button to do so. Unlike Google Hangouts, the video is active as long as the button is held down. As well, this live video function will be part of text conversations as a whole – but the texts share the same ephemerality that made the app popular, as they too disappear once a user leaves the conversation. It’s the immediacy of the app that truly sets it apart – merely sending pictures and text that disappear doesn’t set it too far apart from its rivals – and now that Snapchat is venturing into third party messaging, the space feels likely to continue to heat up.
Snapped Allows For Sending & Viewing Snapchats On Macs
Snapchat just became untethered from mobile, thanks to Snapped, a third-party app that uses Snapchat’s API. The app – eventually to be made available in the app store – was developed by two UC San Diego students, and defaults to using the mac’s front-facing camera in combination with user login info. As well, you can upload pictures from the computer’s hard drive, something previously impossible by Snapchat’s design. Because it’s third party, there are some tweaks: you can choose to mark snaps as un-read, which means friends won’t know if you’ve opened the photo or not. Also, you can mark sent snaps as ‘read,’ so if you want to “take back” a snap, as it were, it will arrive pre-read and un-openable. It raises important questions about Snapchat’s security, particularly in light of the bumpy few months Snapchat has had: if a third party app can allow for photo manipulation in this way, is it also unreasonable to think that the photos themselves are inherently unsecure, savable, and permanent? Snapchat will have to address these issues in the coming weeks and months to remain as viable a medium as it is at present.
Snapchat Now Has Spam Issues
On the heels of its data breach just a short time ago, Snapchat has a new scandal on its hands: Snap Spam. Unwanted photos and videos got sent around to many users that Snapchat was forced to respond this morning, by saying that the increased spam was not related to the hack that went viral. Instead, CEO Evan Spiegel reminded users to change their settings such that only friends can send them Snaps. It’s an about face for Snapchat, who last year turned down several offers to be bought. At this point, it seems like scandal after scandal, and they’ll have to do a lot of work to regain the trust of users who might look for different communications mediums.
