Snap Inc. How the brand is trying hard to stay relevant

Roma Kapadiya, SEO Consultant & Blogger at Nimblechapps pens down her thoughts on what are the ways in which Snapchat is aggressively working towards maintaining it's relevance in the Facebook owned Instagram dominated world. 

Last month, employees at Snap Inc. received an internal memo, in which Evan Spiegel had mentioned something about the past year at Snapchat and talked about his plans for Snap Inc’s future. He started the note by describing what Snap is and what it isn’t. He said Snap Inc. is a camera company that contributes to human progress in the way of empowering people to express themselves, living in the now, learning about the world, and having fun together. He also mentioned how the redesign of the app solved a problem but created many others simultaneously.

Strategy for 2019

Spiegel talked about his strategy for 2019. This part of the memo shows you how Steven himself is not sure as to what exactly Snap Inc is and what it should be focusing its energy on so that it can save itself. In this part, Steven is only able to create a vague picture of what are his plans for achieving his goal.

The problem with Facebook

Over the past one year or more, Facebook has suffocated the life out of Snapchat, and this is something a lot of us have actually noticed. In the infancy of Snapchat, Mark Zuckerberg offered to buy it for $3 billion, which Spiegel turned down. So Facebook then went and bought Instagram and copied all the features that were unique to Snapchat.

Also Read: Is it really Snapchat vs Facebook for original video content? Experts share!

Fall in daily active users

Since this happened, Snapchat’s daily active user growth has largely suffered because of this. This is since the time Instagram started the whole story thing. But it’s not just about the decline in the growth. The daily active users of Snapchat has only fallen down. We don’t know how Spiegel is planning to fight this.

The redesign attempt

The redesign attempt by Snap was done in order to streamline the user experience and turn Snapchat into an app that didn’t offer much to learn anyway. Or maybe this is what was expected earlier. But the redesign turned out to be a flop. Then Snap was forced to re-redesign to fix the problems that were caused.

The Spectacles

Since then, Snap Inc. has also heavily invested in Spectacles. The Spectacles were definitely a hot commodity when they were launched back in 2016. The hype died down after a while and Snap Inc. was left with a lot of unsold stock. Regardless of this, they still released the second version of Spectacles earlier this year. Nobody really bought a pair of the new spectacles and we are still not able to figure out why Snap Inc. did this.

How will Snap remain relevant?

The thing that one notices here is that the financial aspect of the brand or the company is only considered secondary in whatever they do. But maybe this is how it works in Silicon Valley where businesses don’t really sustain but still, new businesses and products find a way to crop up every few months by the way of crowdfunding.

We don’t really know why Snap still puts emphasis on calling itself a camera company, but they are yet to find that one thing that can pull them out of this mess. The question that arises here is what should they be doing in order to still remain relevant?