Normal people and businesses trying to spread their brand on Snapchat find it difficult. For years it lacked an in-app discovery function. You can’t really search people either, unless you have their snapcode, phone number, or user name. But all that changed at the stroke of midnight last Friday. Right when the first quarter of 2017 ended, the company launched an update to create 1 million searchable stories.
Content creators have struggled to build audiences. Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of a digital marketing agency that did $100 million in revenues in 2016 wrote an entire piece discussing the issue.
Snapchat doesn’t have a suggested user list (like Instagram does) or a method to easily search for people, although some websites and apps are trying to make the process easier. There also aren’t any hashtags or retweets that you can piggyback off of like we see on other platforms.
Snapchat’s new search feature is likely to be monitored closely by the company and investors as the unicorn enters its first full quarter as a publicly traded company [ticker: $SNAP]. Wall Street is the home of Pavlovian children, obsessed with seeing immediate results, else they begin demanding executive upheaval and board seats. Fortunately, Snapchat shareholders do not even have voting rights. They are third class dogs. Speaking of dogs, you can search ‘puppies’ on Snapchat and receive an endless stream of puppy videos.
These truly are the best of times.
The feature allows users see what is happening real time from places far reaching like exotic beaches, to sporting events, to a local bar, and much more.
Social media apps have begun copying features from each other. Mark Zuckerberg and his team of coders recently added the ‘story’ feature to Instagram and quickly monetized it with skippable ads. A 24-hour running story function has also appeared recently on actual Facebook.
On April Fool’s day, Snapchat ran a filter that made your snap look like an Instagram post, trolling the copycats at Facebook.
This @Snapchat Instagram filter for April Fool's is the only good joke I've seen today pic.twitter.com/PciM4TO5NV
— Mike Murphy (@mcwm) April 1, 2017
The filter shows only ‘my_mom and 2 others’ liking the photo, lolz.
Snapchat has a filter to look like Instagram THE SHADE???
— Charlie Wilson (@charliewiIson) April 1, 2017
Facebook executives may still have bitter feelings after Snapchat founders told Mark, more or less, to take his $3 billion dollar cash offer and piss off back in November 2013. Snapchat is currently worth about $27 billion, give or take a few hundred million.
The question of who did what first is quickly becoming as irrelevant as the chicken or the egg dilemma.
The real question on investors’ minds is, “Is my money parked in a Facebook or a Twitter?” And it is a fair question for an investor to ask, considering the performance gap between the two stocks over the last 856 days:
Facebook and Twitter both have fantastic ‘discovery’ functions built into their platforms. It is an essential piece of the social media puzzle. People are quickly turned off to a platform if it feels like they are talking to themselves.
Snapchat’s searchable stories were rolled out on the last day of March in select cities. As of now, the feature is unavailable in the ghettos of Detroit. As soon as it is however, I will begin disengaging the outside world for hours on end, instead piping the ‘puppies’ story into my Daydream goggles.
As more information about the feature becomes available, I will discuss it on snapchat. If you are invested in the name, just trading it, or just want to see my really really extremely good looking face, now might be a good time to download the app and follow me.
vCali
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That’s great. But what about making some actual profit from the new update? So far they are burning thru their cash. this stock is good for day traders gambling on swings in sentiment.
You sell ad placements in the story.