Twitter and Snapchat won't last the year

[Fox]

Maybe not complete death but they are both free falling.

Many investors are pulling out of Twitter including billionaire Chris Sacca. They have a massive bot problem, have got huge backlash over censoring and without the elections (which did help twitter a lot) would be way more down.

Snapchat is about to get killed too - Instagram stories are already reducing engagement on Snap by 20%-40% (depending on the source). All the main people I follow are talking about moving over to IG fully or already have. It was a cruel move but by copying their concept and adding it in on top of an already good platform Instagram has destroyed them. Whatsapp and FB messaging are getting in on the daily videos now also.

I really thought Periscope would take off but it looks like they never got their system working 100% and a lot of people moved on after reporting issues with notifications and recording etc.

I find it insane how you could have such a massive platform and never pivot to fix the clear issues.

 

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[BigRomeDawg]

What do you think about Snapchat Spectacles? I think that's such a freaking cool idea and if they were available in my area I'd be on them so fast.

I still get way better engagement on Snapchat vs Instagram stories despite having 10x more followers in Instagram. EDIT: that could be a bot problem on Insta. i know for a fact all my snapchat followers are real people who give a shit. Instagram has so much auto-follow bullshit now

 

[juan917]

^ Snapchat is definitely a GREAT tool for the content creators but as a business they suck. It's alarming that they consider themselves a camera company and not even a social media company. Like what?

What blows my mind is that BOTH these platforms are not even close to profitable and won't be in the near future. That's really sad. If snapchat made the simple decision of not storing every snap on a server, they would be ridicously profitable. Instead they opted to sign multi-year contracts with Google and Amazon to give them hundreds of millions of dollars over a multi-year period. Twitters product has barely changed in years, what are they even spending $ on?

Twitter was designed to be bot friendly from the start btw.

 

[BigRomeDawg]

Not surprised Periscope fell off, Facebook live is killer

 

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[Fortune5ive]

When you start talking video, nothing's really proprietary. Any major platform can duplicate a service.

 

[Andy Black]

Last year, I found Snapchat a fun and useful app for learning to create quick videos on my phone. Other than that, as a consumer, I found it a PITA - I don't want to have to consume only video ffs!!!

Sure, I didn't really know how to grow an audience on Snapchat, but that was part of the problem. On Facebook and YouTube people seem to naturally find you if you're producing content. On Snapchat you grew your audience by siphoning people from other platforms. Maybe that's changed now, but I lost interest in Snapchat as anything other than a clever app for creating short videos (which I still recommend to people, funnily enough because no-one will find your videos!)

Facebook is so much more engaging as a consumer (there's Facebook groups for everything and joining loads of them means you'd feed is full of stuff your actually interested in).

As a channel to reach your market, Facebook is mind blowing.

For me, I'd bet on Mark Z to steer FB over upstarts.

The money will go where the attention goes.

 

[Denim Chicken]

Snapchat's main strength is really generationally limited, it's quite an obscure app that's surprisingly difficult to use. Gary V is bull on snapchat but he's also an investor.
Twitter on the other hand, long done. Twitter is and was such an amazing concept, to be able to get live blips of updates and news, much like a stock ticker. Tweets allow for people to get instant updates faster than IG or FB and yet they refuse to pivot. Continually censoring crap and the bot problem is pretty big. When you have celebrities like Joe Rogan stating he's getting tons of bot requests he never got before, you got a problem.
Twitter was never a true social platform anyway, it was a way of instant mass communication for utilitarian purposes. Maybe they'll get bought out and integrated into a bigger platform.

 

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[Andy Black]

^^^ You just reminded me how non-intuitive the Snapchat interface is. It was almost designed deliberately to exclude people who weren't "in the know"!

Part of Gary V's argument for Snapchat was that all the kiddies were going on it because Mom and Dad weren't on it. And that over time a platform ages up as parents join to keep up with their kids and see their grandkids on social media.

Except Grandma Carol is never going to understand how Snapchat works to find out how to keep in touch with her kids that have moved to Australia.

 

[Pedro Henrique]

Snapchat is still useful, but it will not be as useful as it used to be. Some friends of mine don't use snap anymore, but there a lot that use it, I guess it is not the future. Snapchat should be sold when facebook asked.

 

[JAJT]

My wife and all our friends all are Snapchat addicts.

I decided to get it to stay in the loop on all their fun nonsense. I deleted it within a few days (and I only lasted that long because of Gary V). What a horrible program. I'm pretty tech savvy and I thought it was one of the least intuitive programs I've ever used.

And on top of that, I really don't like the "watch it once or twice and you're done" aspect of it. Which is the main feature.

Everything about that app is annoying to me.

I'm also no big fan of Twitter as a "general" social media tool. I think it EXCELS at "as it happens" news and important updates but that's about where my enjoyment of it ends. If there's an attack on a city or emergency or major incident or weird "goings on" that you want to figure out - nothing beats twitter. It's like getting aggregated eye witness accounts from all angles with screenshots and videos and information. I saw attack helicopters fly overhead one day and was like "what the hell?". News had nothing. Facebook had nothing. Twitter had like 200 screenshots and videos and explanations that there was some demonstration going on that has been planned for a while. Well - there I have it. That's useful! And if you want to tell all your customers that there's a service interruption of any kind - really you can't beat it.

 

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[CycleGuy]

The Hustle has talked about the sinking Twitter ship for awhile. They should have purged the bots. Organic growth on twitter seems to me to be much more difficult than Instagram. I also think less people are actively using twitter as one of their "go-to" apps.

Snapchat on the other hand has a BIG advantage. They are one of the Apps of choice for the young generation. The young people see FB as the "old people app" which it is if you look at the sectors of generation growth. FB is losing the cool battle with the iGen but I guess that's why Zuck picked up Instagram.

Snap just needs to keep pushing their paid advertising. The first members of iGeneration or Gen Z are starting to become real consumers. My brother-in-law is 18 and uses snap religiously. I know he's not alone.