This article explains Snapchat's social product success methodology from three perspectives: efficiency, media, and dimension.
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Snapchat is finally going public. The company has more than 150 million daily active users and a valuation of nearly $25 billion. It is seen as having the potential to become the next Facebook. I have three questions about this company: 1) What’s so great about Snapchat? 2) If Snapchat is so powerful, why hasn’t a direct competitor emerged in China over the years? 3) Why did Snapchat make a pair of glasses when it was doing so well and still call itself a camera company? Recently, I finally figured out these three questions. What followed was an upgrade in my thinking about the essence of many social and community products such as WeChat and Momo. Two years ago, I wrote an article called The Essence of Social Media is to Build Media. In this article, I drew a conclusion about social products: Social products cater to, induce and amplify the humanity of each individual, and restore, transfer and reconstruct the relationships between people in the entire society. Based on this, I believe that what a good social product should do is to build connections and create media. Today, I want to upgrade my social product theory again, which is the syllogism of dimension + media + efficiency that I recently summarized. Efficiency: The ultimate goal of any social product is to facilitate connections between people with the highest efficiency. Medium: To facilitate connections, the only thing social products need to do is to build the medium. Dimension: Each medium is based on one or several dimensions, and there is at most one medium in a dimension. For example, Momo’s dimension is stranger social networking based on geographic location. The medium built by Momo is a product that allows people to arrange, search, find, and communicate according to geographic location. The result of Momo is to connect nearby strangers in the most efficient way . Efficiency is the result, medium is the method, and dimension is the basis of everything. Just imagine, if it weren’t for the new dimension of geographic location created by mobile phones, would Momo have a place in the market? The answer must be no. And because Momo was the best in media building among many products at the time, it ultimately produced the most efficient network effect and became the ultimate winner. I have summarized some well-known social/community products here. You will find that every product that can exist for a long time has its own exclusive dimension. Not to mention the distant ones, the recent ones include Inke ’s live broadcast dimension, Keep ’s vertical fitness dimension, and so on. The biggest charm of social products is their network effect, so social products are destined to be monopoly products, that is to say, there will always be only one player left in a dimension. Therefore, dimension is the basis of everything. If you still want to make or invest in a social product, you might as well think about whether you have found a new dimension? Having written this far, the answers to the first two questions mentioned at the beginning are already obvious. What’s so great about Snapchat? What’s amazing is that it has conquered the social dimension of pictures and established strong relationship connections. Let’s explain this a little bit. When Snapchat first appeared in 2011, the most popular social software used by Americans was Facebook, where everyone could check each other's life updates and status, and they could communicate in simple text messages in private messages. At the end of 2011, WhatsApp had just received an $8 million investment from Sequoia and began to seize the market for text communication tools . At this time, if I want to communicate with friends through pictures, Snapchat is the only option. Snapchat used the feature of self-destructing messages (note, I think this is a feature, not the most important thing in essence) to quickly make people accept and recognize the application. It did a good job of building the medium and occupied the picture dimension . Ultimately, this feature converted a large number of users and allowed users to establish acquaintance relationships on it in the most efficient way. This is where Snapchat comes in handy. So why is there no direct counterpart to Snapchat in China? We have said before that because of the existence of network effects, each dimension will eventually be occupied by only one product, but the products do not necessarily correspond one-to-one to the dimensions. The biggest difference between the domestic market at that time and the foreign market was that WeChat was doing too well and too fast. After the launch of WeChat, it quickly established strong relationships based on the relationship chain foundation retained by QQ, and allowed people to communicate conveniently through text, voice, and pictures. Snapchat quickly formed its own set of social relationships and established its foothold before Facebook or WhatsApp had a chance to follow suit, but China did not have this opportunity. Meitu has always used Snapchat as its benchmark, but the biggest difference between it and Snapchat is the strong social relationship chain of acquaintances. So why can't Meitu (or Alipay ) break this barrier? Let’s go back to what we just said. There will only be one social product in one dimension. The strong social relationship of acquaintances has been occupied by WeChat. So you will find that no matter who you meet through any other product, as long as you eventually establish an acquaintance relationship, you will all say one thing, which is "What’s your WeChat ID?" Therefore, WeChat did not give any chance to the second social product based on the picture dimension. This is why it is impossible to create a Snapchat in China. In other words, WeChat itself carries some of Snapchat's functions. Part of WeChat plus part of Meitu is a direct counterpart to Snapchat. In fact, to go a step further, if WeChat is a replacement and evolution of the mobile phone's "address book", then Snapchat is actually a replacement and evolution of the mobile phone's "camera", which brings up the answer to the third question. As Snapchat put it in its IPO prospectus: Snap is a camera company. We believe that improving the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. Our products empower people to express themselves, be present in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. With the blinking cursor being the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe the screen will be the starting point for most products on most smartphones. This is because the images produced by smartphone cameras carry more content and richer information than other forms of textual information typed on a keyboard. This means we are willing to take risks in an attempt to create innovative and different camera products that better reflect and improve our life experiences. Why did Snapchat make Spectacles smart glasses? This seemingly magical strategic behavior makes a lot of sense. Since Snapchat is based on pictures, the key is to allow users to better record, share and express through pictures. Glasses can record in real time better than mobile phones, and the photos taken are closer to what we see with our naked eyes. Therefore, it is completely reasonable for Snapchat to develop Spectacles, and it is also in line with Snapchat’s original intention and goals. Looking back, mobile phones have brought several major changes to people. Among them, the location factor created Momo, the always-online factor created WeChat, and the low-cost, high-quality camera factor created Snapchat. In comparison, WeChat first had text communication, then established strong relationships, opened up Moments for people to consume dynamic content between friends, and finally created public accounts for people to consume professional content. Snapchat started with picture communication, then established strong relationships, and then launched the Story feature similar to Moments. It also brought in professional content producers (such as Vice, CNN, National Geographic, etc.) and had the Publisher Story feature. The development paths of the two are exactly the same, except that one focuses on text and the other focuses on pictures. The focus of Meitu is also pictures, but there is an essential difference between it and Snapchat, because Meitu is about photo editing, which is post-processing after taking pictures. Therefore, the user scenario is to take a photo with a camera first, and then open Meitu to edit the photo. Meitu has thus become a traffic tool, while Snapchat is the camera itself. Since you can make yourself more beautiful when taking photos, why do you need to edit the photos later? Faceu is also a competitor to Snapchat, and it was developed based on it, which means that it is more "what you see is what you get" than Meitu. But Faceu has an essential difference from Snapchat. When you open Snapchat, the rear camera automatically opens. However, when you open Faceu or other similar products, the front camera automatically opens. As Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel said: Photos are not memories any more. They are used to tell stories by the new generations. For the new generation, photos no longer represent a memory, but a form of narrative. Photographing yourself is for preservation and memory, while photographing the outside world is for expression and communication. Since the benchmark product is WeChat or Facebook, the more important value of the product is naturally the value of expression and communication. Therefore, behind the seemingly simple difference in the startup camera setting is a qualitative difference in vision and realm between Snapchat and similar products. (Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel and his fiancée supermodel Miranda Kerr) Having written this far, I randomly asked a girl which app she would subconsciously open when taking photos now? She said that her first reaction when taking photos now is to open Faceu (which shows that Faceu is indeed very good). I then asked why not WeChat? She replied that it was too slow. As I understand it, there are two aspects of "slow" here. The first is the loading speed, and the second is the operation level. To open the camera on WeChat: 1. Open WeChat 2. Open a chat box 3. Open the bottom function bar 4. Click the photo button And to take photos on Snapchat, there is only one step: open Snapchat. This is also a qualitative difference. Many people don’t understand why Snapchat opens with a lens, and why you have to take a photo first and then choose friends to send it to. Now it is very clear. Some time ago, WeChat designed a function to promote short videos. As long as you open WeChat and drag the window downwards, the short video shooting page will be automatically opened. This function is believed to be designed to shorten the path, but it was eventually deleted. Not using a function because it is "slow" can also give us a lot of inspiration. If one day opening WeChat means slow loading, complicated functions, etc., then it is very likely that I will start to slowly transfer the people I contact most frequently to the new platform, and gradually form a migration of the relationship chain. In my opinion, this is one of the only two possibilities for new social products to challenge WeChat. The other possibility is the emergence of new hardware platforms, which completely subvert mobile phones as a communication tool. So, to put it simply, social products die from complexity and redundancy, and from slowness and heaviness. Zhang Xiaolong 's restraint has indeed given WeChat long-lasting vitality. Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising The author of this article @Qu Kai is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! |
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