How Snapchat Became Popular
https://www.clickz.com/12-valuable-marketing-lessons-from-snapchats-success/97578/
This article talks about the 12 valuable marketing lessons from snapchat’s success. Snapchat was created by three stanford students. They were inspired by the idea that one of the founder wanted to delete his message sent to his girlfriend. Later, they created this app intending to provide creative ways of communication on social media. At first, the three of them just asked their friends to use the app because friends would support them without any cause. And it is very easy to persuade your friends to use an app. So their friends are the early adopters. Later, they realized that in order to spread the prevalence of Snapchat, they need to target at the right audiences, such as teenagers and young adults. Apparently, snapchat becomes a blast among young people and has more and more users. Nowadays, Snapchat has over 100 million active daily snapchat users and growing. Other than this early target-audience strategies, Snapchat also boosts engagement with the idea of fear of missing out, seize the mobile power by turning each user into publishers , and creates effective advertising by using vertical videos.
The strategies used to make Snapchat popular is very similar to what we talked about cascading behavior in networks in class. We can think of people using other apps as strategy A, and people who adopted Snapchat as strategy B. Snapchat has initial users, founders’ friends, they are the initial people who use strategy B. Later because those people also have friends, their friends started to use Snapchat if the payoff of switching to Snapchat is greater than the payoff of sticking to strategy A. Each individual would think of Snapchat and other apps as competitors and would make judgement based on the proportion of friends using Snapchat and the benefits of using Snapchat. As more and more people use Snapchat, the cascading behavior continues and spreads out. It is noteworthy that the founders selected young people to be their first audience, and it is very important to start with narrow audience because if you pick the right ones, then you really have an advantage from competitors.