Diffusion of Snapchat
Snapchat rose to popularity when I was in high school. I remember hearing about it and installing it because of my middle school friend, who lived in a different state (my family moved just as I started high school). But now that I think about it, after learning about diffusion in class, that friend was probably the final push that made me get the app; the one more person that made Snapchat go over my threshold of downloading or not.
Let me briefly introduce my friend network at the time. I had 4 close friends from middle school and 4 close friends in high school. This was at some point in freshman year, so let’s assume that the closeness with my 8 friends was about the same level; they are all strong ties.
S represents Snapchat, F represents Facebook
Initially, the main social media platform we all used was Facebook — more specifically, Facebook Messenger. Through my friend W, I learned that all 4 of my middle school friends (W, A, I, J) used Snapchat. Of course, as Snapchat was on the rise among teenagers, I had heard of the app beforehand. I think I remember hearing that one of my high school friends, N, also used the app (probably with her middle school friends, since our high school friend group did not use Snapchat). As I learned that 5 out of my 8 friends use Snapchat, I decided to download the app and give it a try. The threshold to switch from Facebook Messenger to Snapchat was probably 1/2.
Of course, it wasn’t a complete switchover just yet, since my high school friend group still used Facebook Messenger. However, at some point, we all switched over to Snapchat and abandoned Facebook Messenger. Looking at the network graph, my friends K, H, M probably switched over because 2 out of their 4 friends in our cluster (N and S, myself) used Snapchat, which is greater than or equal to the threshold of 1/2. (Of course, this is assuming that we are in this simplified network where K, H, M do not have outside friends).
S represents Snapchat, F represents Facebook
After connecting my experiences in Snapchat adoption with the concept of diffusion of innovations we learned in class, I wanted to learn more about it and found an article that talked about innovation diffusion and marketing. This article talked about innovation characteristics that affect adoption: advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, observability. I tried to match these characteristics with Snapchat.
- advantage — Snapchat’s major advantage over other communications and social media platforms is that the images and videos you send to your friends disappear after a few seconds.
- compatibility — Snapchat works on any mobile devices, whether it be iPhone, Galaxy, or any other smartphones. It even works on devices like the iPod Touch, iPad, and other tablets as long as the device is connected to the internet (via wifi or cellular data).
- complexity — Snapchat is intuitive to use, as the button to take pictures is very big and the button to send the picture is a paper airplane icon.
- trialability — the Snapchat app is completely free to download and use.
- observability — Snapchat is often used in public since users often take pictures in public to send to their friends (such as taking a picture of their lunch menu).
From this exercise, I think Snapchat already featured pretty good characteristics that can positively affect adoption. Once it took off, I believe it also did a good job of advertising its prime feature that the content sent disappears. This made me curious on how Snapchat actually did start off.
In 2011, Snapchat started catching on among high schools around Southern California, after one of the founder’s cousin (a high schooler in LA) started sharing it with their friends. The advantage of vanishing messages and the wide compatibility where only an internet-usable device and internet is needed greatly appealed to teenagers who don’t all own smartphones (but may own something like an iPod Touch), as well as college students. Snapchat quickly took hold of the diffusion of innovation concept and spread throughout networks rapidly like wildfire, eventually spreading to teenagers and college students throughout the U.S.
It was interesting to learn about how Snapchat spread, especially since I had some base knowledge about the innovation diffusion concept that we learned in class. I feel like I understood this concept more after connecting it to my personal experience with how I came to adopt Snapchat, and am curious about what the next successful social media platform would be and how it would spread.
https://www.hausmanmarketingletter.com/innovation-adoption-diffusion-age-social-media/