How Snapchat Gained Success By Going Viral At High Schools Across Los Angeles
This Forbes article examined the viral growth of Snapchat and the role of LA high schools in that growth. According to the article, Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel had primarily pitched the app to college students and other young adults in the California area. But, the app only caught on when high schoolers in LA discovered that they could now pass ephemeral, digital notes back and forth during class.
Spiegel had never anticipated high school students that sparked the wildfire-like spread of Snapchat, though the timing of the app’s release was crucial to this. Many students received phones with front-facing cameras in 2011 (with which they can send selfies), and by 2012, the app had caught on. Snapchat first spread from LA high schools to other high schools in the region, then to college students. After Spiegel and the Snapchat team realized this, they used the fact to their advantage.
The article maintains that the nature of messaging apps like Snapchat is inherently viral. The app spread throughout networks at various schools and colleges. According to the article, “some of its early growth mimicked Facebook’s early growth at colleges, although Snap never restricted its membership to these groups the way Facebook did early on.”
This was an interesting read as it provided a lot of material for analysis of the spread of Snapchat. It is often fascinating to go back and analyze big successes in the world of technology, like Snapchat and Facebook, and learn from their techniques.
The growth of Snapchat can be examined through the perspective of networks, specifically, network diffusion. The textbook mentions a phenomenon called the “diffusion of innovations,” in which we can examine how technologies spread across a social network as people influence their friends to adopt new ideas. This is precisely what led to the rapid growth of Snapchat, as LA high schoolers in social networks told their friends to “download Snapchat in between classes.”
The textbook mentions historical studies that have been done to model the diffusion of innovations in social networks. It would be interesting to see this diffusion applied to the analysis of many more modern technologies.