Snap Inc. released their plan for the new and improved Snapchat app just yesterday, and it’s nothing like you would expect. While many social media platforms have built their interfaces to integrate social media content with day-to-day posts from friends and family, Snap took a unique approach.
Here are a few of the interesting and exciting updates on the newly designed application:
Users can now find social media content from friends on the left side of their device, while stories from media outlets will appear on the right side. The detachment of content is what the company refers to as “the best way to communicate with friends and the best way to watch great content.”
Snapchat’s new dynamic Friends page will use what the company refers to as a “Best Friends algorithm.” The algorithm learns about you based on habits and orders your contacts based on engagement.
To continue social media content personalization, Snap introduced their new Discover page. Discover will personalize content to the user in question, keeping their live subscriptions at the top, followed by Stories the user may be interested in based on past engagement.
Snap, Inc. has a clear advantage in building their platform re-design around the individual rather than media. Snapchat’s current social media advertising capabilities allow brands to implement advertising between all types of content (both personal and media-based), so the separation of content is likely inconsequential to self-serve advertisers on the platform.
Additionally, the messaging around the app’s redesign is combative to the current state of social media and fake news; they want to create a space where you don’t “feel like we have to perform for our friends,” and make it “easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them.” The redesign is all about you, your preferences, your needs – which isn’t always the case on other social platforms where advertised social media content reigns supreme.
Snap’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, explains it may “be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don’t yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application.” The update comes after criticism that Snapchat is “difficult to understand or hard to use.”
For those who have begun posting to Instagram Stories in lieu of the Snapchat, be sure to update your app this Friday, 12/1 when a “small percentage” of users will be able to experience the new and improved redesign. For the rest of us, the update should be available within the next few weeks.