Snapchat: Diffusion of Innovations

            

Picture from Forbes website

            Snapchat is one of the most popular social media platforms used today. Users primarily fall in the range of 13 to 24 years old, so clearly a younger demographic. Forbes magazine featured an article on Snapchat’s success in 2018. Using the Diffusion of Innovations Theory as a lens to look into the history of the app, it’s success is clearly evident.

            The pioneer and innovator stage of Snapchat is an interesting beginning. The idea actually occurred through a conversation between two students Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel, who attended Stanford University, about the concept of disappearing pictures. Therefore, Snapchat was born. However, what a lot of people do not know is that the app actually started as a mobile website under the name Picaboo. It was not until July 2011 that the app we all know and love was created as Snapchat the mobile app.

            The app was off to a slow start with its early adopters being other Stanford students as well as family members of the creators. Evan’s cousins proved crucial to the app’s success by using good old fashioned word of mouth to fellow students at their high schools. Originally, Snapchat was created for college students to cover their trails easily when it came to sending pictures to other people, however high schooler’s adoption took off just as quickly.

             One month after the app launch, 127 users had made an account.  Within just nine months, the early majority took over with 100,000 users at the end of April 2012. The number of users had rapidly increased through the popularity of the concept of something being temporary. If you sent a photo it would not be permanently stored. Snapchat was the first platform that made users feel like their footprint was not going to be permanently displayed.

            I truly believe that Snapchat’s success can also be attributed to the timing of the release of smartphones.  In the Forbes article, the author notes that 2011 was the year of the “forward-facing cameras” otherwise known as Snpachat’s golden opportunity. With the ease of downloading the app from the Apple Store and snapping a quick selfie on your forward-facing camera the appeal of the app spread like wildfire.  

            Snapchat usage took a downward turn in 2013 when users began to be bored by the app. Snapchat decided to update the app with a new feature known as Snapchat stories. Stories were posted to your profile and lasted 24 hours. This truly had a large part in the overall success of the app and the revival from the negative turn. The app saw that 80% of their users were now using Snapchat daily due to this update.

Picture from the Verge wesbite

            Looking at Snapchat in more recent terms, the app has roughly 310 million users as of July 2019 according to Omnicore Agency. 190 million of those users use the app daily. It will be interesting to see what steps Snapchat continues to take in order to keep their app up to date and relevant.