The recent surge of popularity of Instagram Stories of 200m daily users over Snapchat's 161m has many questioning the future of Snapchat (parent company Snap Inc.). With users' recent ability to add selfie stickers (and an addition of geo-filters expected to arrive any day now), Instagram's transformation into a Snapchat copycat is nearly complete. Many are already dismissing Snapchat to the fate of MySpace and Twitter. Snap has to keep innovating, and quickly, to avoid the same fate.
To that end, Snap-to-Store (image below) was announced last Wed and could drive advertiser revenue to contribute to the bottom line. This tool will help advertisers measure whether their ads actually drove users into specific locations, like retail stores or restaurants. The tool will be great for brands to measure ROI of ad spends. It still begs the question: if users are eroded on the platform, is this a place that will advertisers will want to be even with this concrete development of ROI?
Should Snap Inc. take a page out of Instagram's parent company Facebook and capitalize on popular Instagram features while its user count is still high? For example, when Instagram Stories rolled out, it came with a brief tutorial on how to use the product. There is still a wealth of the population who don't know how to use Snapchat, and a "how-to" could make Snapchat accessible to a greater segment of the population. That alone as product development likely would not suffice obviously, so I hope to see further innovation to fuel competition between these two powerhouses to the benefit of the marketplace.
Image taken from Snap Inc.'s SEC filing.
