There is an eternal struggle between the most powerful social networks to see which is the one that gets the audience better and offers more novelties and commodities for users. Between communication strategies, branding and rebranding, filters, buttons and share options, Snapchat has tried to get back on its feet after the well-known and very popular comment made by Kylie Jenner about their app being boring, a few weeks ago they tried with Bounce and now they have announced a new partnership with one of the most powerful companies of our time: Amazon
Visual Search
Now more than ever, people are willing to make their purchases online and even more if they are done directly on an app where they already invest a lot of time on a regular basis; while Facebook giving us Marketplace, putting all the available products within our zone or according to our tastes, and Instagram integrating the “buy” option on Discovery, Snapchat now adds “Visual Search”, a tool that on closer inspection really looks a lot like Pinterest’s Lens.
“Lens”, which was added a year ago, allows people to find products similar to an item they see on the street given that we provide a picture, for example, if we find a couch on a living room that we liked, all we have to do is take a picture and Pinterest will offer a list of pins that looks like our selection.
Several days ago, Snapchat announced a new way to search for products directly on Amazon right on the app, with something pretty similar to Lens, but giving us the chance to access directly to the place where we can actually buy the product that caught our attention, a very relevant advance that might give Snapchat a completely different twist, one would wonder if they are trying to redefine themselves.
Some say that this is due to the daily loss of users, although good results are to be expected, since Pinterest reported 600 million visual searches the month Lens launched, a better growth rate than Twitter or Snapchat, that went on to get 250 million users, what users really want today, after all, is purchase, knowing your purchase options on the palm of your hand makes your life simpler.
Letters left hanging
This new update won’t guarantee that Snapchat will get back its freshness and the preference of the younger audience since, as we mentioned earlier, by becoming a virtual catalog it does get farther away from the apps initial purpose, however it does please momentarily Amazon’s will to create its own social app, and because Snapchat wants to get back in the game, efforts are double
We are getting closer and closer to the era of consumer immediacy, you want it? you got it. What we don’t know is where the limit exists for this metamorphosis of the place we used to go to relax our minds and keep in touch with our loved ones, right now it’s a store that take advantage of our free time to basically sell us interactions.
Sources
www.socialmediatoday.com
www.snap.com