Snapchat is one of the most popular cellular applications used by teens today. For high school and college students, Snapchat has almost become a necessity in order to keep in touch with people and stay caught up on different events and peoples’ lives. However, in comparison to other social media platforms, Snapchat seems to have some drawbacks and weaknesses as a company.
Overall, Snapchat definitely has the one of the highest number of users in comparison to other forms of social media, but where they lack as a business is their advertising. Until now, Snapchat has had two separate feeds, one for chatting, and one for viewing posts shared with all of a person’s friends or followers. When the app was developed, there was very little room for advertisements. This might have been appealing for Snapchat users, because no one likes to be interrupted by ads. But, this was a problematic and risky move for the company, as advertisements are the source of a large chunk of their income and affect their position in the market. Most of their ads were very short and disappeared quickly after viewing another user’s story. As a result of this, Snapchat began to introduce stories from different companies to make up for this weakness.
What used to be the stories page was transformed into a discover page for different companies’ articles. Companies like Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, and others invest in a place to post their articles on this page, thus improving Snapchat’s financial situation.
Last week, Snapchat released a new update that combined the chat and story feeds. This made the application much less user-friendly. From a business standpoint, this seems to be incredibly dangerous for the company, because in the last two years, companies like Facebook and Instagram have been taking their ideas and adapting their applications to have more exciting Snapchat-like features. Until now, the company had been coming up with various updates that has been keeping the users interested in the application. It seems that people are disappointed in this new setup.
From a user perspective, the new Snapchat update has increased the complexity of the application and made viewing stories and chats inconvenient. The biggest problem that users face now that the two feeds are combined is that as new stories are posted on different accounts, new people move to the top of the feed. If one is in engaged in a conversation, this can be frustrating, as double tapping the first name on one’s feed may result in messages being sent to the wrong individuals.
Snapchat can’t afford to make more mistakes like this in the future if they want to continue to be successful. It won’t be long until other companies start to dominate the world of internet communication once again.
