Snapchat is one of the most popular social applications today.
Not everyone gets it, but it’s particularly famous among the youngest smartphone users including teens and young adults.
As of the third quarter of 2017, the photo and video sharing application had 178 million daily active users (DAUs) worldwide, up from 153 million global DAUs in the corresponding quarter of the previous year, according to Statista, a statistics and studies portal.
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That’s quite an accomplishment, given the increasing competition from Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp, which have rolled out features that imitate Snapchat’s.
With such a performance, does the company need to do anything but watch its revenues grow?
Not a pretty picture
Snapchat seems to be putting investors on edge, as the company’s losses more than tripled from the previous year to $443 million in the third quarter 2017, while its sales fell well short of Wall Street’s estimates, according to CNN Money.
On November 7, 2017, Snapchat stock plunged as much as 20 per cent, as reported by CNN Money.
The application is also not doing as good as Instagram Stories, a Snapchat knockoff product, which recently hit 300 million daily users.
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All social media apps are scrambling to add new features and grab the biggest possible market share.
So how is Snapchat reacting to all of this?
Not a snap decision: a complete overhaul
The Verge, a multimedia platform, quoted CEO Evan Spiegel revealing that Snapchat is working on a significant overhaul of its app, which will be unveiled on December 4, 2017.
“One thing we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use and our team has been working on responding to this feedback.”
He confirms that a redesigned, easier-to-use Snapchat is coming.
Spiegel says that “there is a strong likelihood that the redesign of our application will be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don’t yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application.”
New look Snapchat
Engadget, a platform for technology reviews, reveals the changes that will be applied to Snapchat.
It says: “Whereas the app will still open to the camera, it will reportedly no longer separate your friends’ messages and stories in tabs to the left and the right. Instead, the redesign will bundle user communications in a feed on the left.”
It continued: “To the right will lie crowdsourced stories, along with content from Snapchat’s media partners.”
While Snapchat is making a complete overhaul to its app, other social apps have already made several changes to stay in the market.
What changes did other social apps make?
Be prepared to tweet more!
Twitter has recently announced on Tuesday that it was doubling the number of characters that users can type into a tweet to now fit 280 characters, up from 140.
Learning English, a multimedia source of news, explained that Twitter, by removing that barrier, is hoping people will tweet more.
Stay live with Facebook!
On August 15, 2017, Facebook announced a list of updates for both mobile and desktop users.
According to 9to5, a technology news website, Facebook is gradually rolling out several changes to its iconic News Feed.
It explained that the comment section was being dramatically overhauled to look like chat bubbles more.
9to5 added that Facebook was working to make texts a bit easier to read. “The color contrast is being increased across the interface, while profile pictures are becoming circular,” it said.
Additionally, users can now start a live stream directly from the camera interface.
Made a mistake? Take it back!
Statista reveals that WhatsApp had, as of July 2017, more than 1.3 billion monthly active users, up from over one billion MAU in February 2016.
But despite its success, the Facebook-owned company always tries to compete by releasing new features every now and then.
According to Gadgets 360, a technology news platform, one of the most important updates this year was the new Status feature, which was rolled out to all users globally in February.
It explained that the new WhatsApp Status feature allowed users to change their status to a short video or multiple photos that will automatically disappear in 24 hours.
The app had, as of the third quarter of 2017, 300 million daily active Status users worldwide, up from 250 million global DAU in the previous quarter, according to Statista.
An important feature added to WhatsApp as well is the ability to unsend embarrassing messages, after a new update added the ability to delete sent messages for the first time, within seven minutes of the initial message being sent, as reported by The Telegraph.
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