Marketers Have Yet to Embrace Snapchat

Source: Statista

Instagram is having its moment in the marketing limelight. A new study from Social Media Examiner found that nearly three-quarters of marketers they surveyed are working with Instagram, a 7-point increase from last year’s report. The ‘gram was the only platform to see a significant jump in usage, with YouTube registering a modest 4-point increase in reported use. 

Marketers interest with Instagram may be somewhat motivated by the significant jump in the referral traffic coming from the image oriented social network. According to Merkle, Instagram experienced a 114 percent increase year-on-year in its referral traffic. Instagram is also one of the few social networks whose reported user base is growing, an appealing fact for marketers. 

Snapchat and Twitter both saw a decrease in the share of marketers reporting use, with Twitter showing a 3-point dip and Snapchat dropping down 2-points, a significant dip for a platform that barely registered interest with marketers last year.

Infographic: Marketers Have Yet to Embrace Snapchat | Statista

Facebook’s Snapchat Clones Have 500M Users Each

First introduced on Instagram in August 2016, the Stories format was heavily “inspired” by one of Snapchat’s most popular features and gradually found its way to all of Facebook’s social media and messaging apps.

All of Facebook’s stories features, i.e. Instagram Stories, WhatsApp Status (which might as well have been named Stories too) and Facebook Stories have surpassed Snapchat in terms of daily active users by now, regardless of whose idea it originally was. The ongoing shift towards stories at the expense of feeds in social media poses a new challenge for Facebook, because it’s unclear whether the new format can be monetized as effectively as the news feed. 

“One of the challenges that marketers have is keeping up where consumers are”, COO Sheryl Sandberg said in an earnings call earlier this year. “If you think about our history, people made the shift to mobile before marketers did. And I think one of the successes we’ve had is we made it easier for advertisers to move into a mobile environment. And just as we did that in mobile, now we are very focused on doing that in the new things that people are doing, and Stories is a big part of that.”

Attack of the (Social Media) Clones

Facebook may have disappointed investors with its second quarter results and grim outlook on Wednesday, but that doesn’t mean that all is bad in the company’s social media empire. In fact, one of the reasons for the company’s warning of slowing revenue growth in coming quarters is the success of the relatively new Stories format across Facebook’s platforms. First introduced on Instagram in August 2016, the Stories format was heavily “inspired” by one of Snapchat’s most popular features and gradually found its way to all of Facebook’s social media apps.

Both Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status (which might as well have been named Stories as well) have long surpassed Snapchat in terms of daily active users and Facebook Stories is probably next in line. The ongoing shift towards stories at the expense of feeds in social media poses a new challenge for Facebook, because it’s unclear whether the new format can be monetized as effectively as the news feed. “Will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? We honestly don’t know”, COO Sheryl Sandberg admitted in Wednesday’s conference call. However, the same was once said about the shift to mobile usage and we all know that Facebook managed that seismic shift exceptionally well.

Social Media Infographic