When Will Snapchat Stop Being The Future And Become The Present?

If you look at any technology blog, Snapchat is projected to be the next preeminent social network. I feel like people have been saying this for a few years now with that day still having yet to come. All of these mounting expectations around the industry has left me wondering when or if Snapchat will ever meet its highly anticipated full potential.

While the app has come quite far from its basic origins in late 2011, allowing users to now send videos and group snaps, introducing stories and animated filters, and giving news outlets slick feeds to post engaging content, Snapchat has been around longer than I was in high school years and has yet to truly take off.

Has it cemented itself in our culture as a popular form of social media? Yes.

Is the story of the creators turning down Mark Zuckerberg and refusing to sell it inspiring, heartwarming, and awesome? Yes.

Is it ready to join Facebook atop the food chain? No, and I don’t think it will ever be a challenger.

While Facebook may have missed out on buying Snapchat and what David Eggers would call “completing the Circle” by controlling essentially every generation of Internet users, the first great social media site remains the platform to beat.

At the end of its first five years online, Facebook had over 360 million active users. Snapchat, which met that milestone this past December, has somewhere between 150 and 200 million active users.

After a rapid two years of growth when it tripled its number of daily users, 2016 seemed to be the year where Snapchat would finally completely explode when it averaged 15 million new users in each of the year’s first three quarters. In the final quarter of the year though, Snapchat added only 5 million users, slowing its progress and suggesting perhaps a bit of stagnation.

The reason for Facebook’s prominence in usage even in a world seven-yards behind in technological innovation is its broader reach.

Even though Facebook’s popularity has dropped among younger users in recent years, its simple, yet timeless, tools such as the pages for events and groups has maintained its relevance among the demographic that Snapchat is targeting while still reigning supreme over middle-aged adults.

Alternatively, Snapchat may be used more every day by the most active consumers of the Internet but that is really its only target audience. A good amount of parents have made Snapchat accounts but in reality, how often do they actually use it? It took long enough for this age group to adjust to texting so I don’t think they are likely to make a further transition to sending pictures with each message. Similarly, a mom is more likely to post a picture on Facebook bragging about how smart or talented her child is than a ten-second video on Snapchat of him actually doing something.

Snapchat is great at what it does and will continue to develop every year with more and more cool features that empower millennials to share pictures and experiences in the moment in new and exciting ways. If Snapchat’s goal is to be the mainstream form of communication for millennials, then it can just continue to execute its game plan and be successful.

However, if the app has its eyes (or lack thereof since its logo doesn’t have any) on taking over the Internet, it has to find a way to engage older users and I don’t see people over the age of 30 really getting into it. At least until our generation reaches that age group and isn’t interested in whatever site our children are infatuated with.

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