July 19, 2018
The strenuous competition between Snapchat and Instagram/Facebook goes on.
Last year we saw Snapchat’s fortune decrease following the launch of the IPO at the beginning of March.
Source: Google
The profit decline can be blamed on a mix of overpromising and underdelivering in terms of customer growth, but also on Snapchat’s incapacity to sufficiently generate revenue from advertising.
As if this was not enough, every new feature released by the company, such as Stories, was immediately copied and made better by Zuckerberg’s developers, which in turn generated huge revenue for their own platforms.
Aware of the increasing competition, the “social media golden child” recently decided to implement developer APIs bundled up into a “Snapkit”.
There will be a login API to let other apps integrate a Snapchat login to allow users to access their sites, just like Facebook. Secondly, another API will be dedicated to the camera. This will let the users create their own Snap stickers and filters within the camera app. There is also the possibility to utilise your avatars on a variety of other apps thanks to the Bitmoji integration.
The most interesting new feature of all is the “Themed stories” API. Thanks to this, users and third parties can now tap into content from public stories and create videos on their own websites.
Obviously, this is a move that Twitter and Facebook launched a while ago with great success. Being able to authenticate for other apps means there is going to be more of a market for sharing data.
You might have thought that the Facebook scandal put a brake on it, but it actually generated a good momentum for other young social media companies trying to use the login APIs on other platforms.
People are now suspicious of Facebook attitude towards user data handling and this might provide an opportunity for Snapchat, as it promises it’s only going to give out usernames and nothing else.
A new wind of storytelling and digital marketing is blowing on Snapchat, but will it be enough?