How to Decide Whether to Invest Your Resources in Facebook or Snapchat
For the sake of candor regarding this week’s topic, the writer would at first like to make a slightly embarrassing admission: December 2013 was the first time I saw Snapchat in the wild, on a bus full of college students driving through Pennsylvania on my way to NYC. On that day, in spite of acknowledging the nascent network’s mastery at knowing and playing to their audience, I never in a million years thought that I would be discussing it on par with Facebook three years later.
I mention that story because it also speaks to one of the ways Snapchat simply annihilates Facebook: being relevant to youth, with 60% of its users falling between the ages of 13-24. So if you’re a company looking to hone your social media focus, strap in as we weigh the pros and cons of each service to help you determine which one is worth your time and money.
But besides being the preferred social network for reaching a younger user base, what else can Snapchat honestly claim to do better than Facebook? For example, if the goal of your campaign is simply to reach the largest number of people possible, than Facebook is the obvious choice with its 1.65 billion monthly active users. At 100 million daily users, Snapchat is definitely trailing the social giant.
However, two areas that Snapchat has FB beat in is Fun and Ephemerality. Regarding the latter, Snapchat basically introduced ephemeral, or terminal, content to the masses and with Snaps tapping out at 24 hours, the social network is a hotbed for building anticipation. In terms of fun, this is another area Snapchat has seemingly focused on more than any other social company, from the countless filters and new features they are constantly rolling out to the very nature of the app–if you’ve never been with someone while they record a “story,” you’ll be shocked by just how easy to integrate Snapchat in your daily behavior is. Finally, in terms of an authentic experience, Snapchat’s legion of user-generated content and the absence of certain brands and celebrities help to keep the network feeling infinitely more authentic than FB.
In addition to audience, the other key area Facebook seriously beats its competition in is engagement. By 2018, it is expected that the average US adult will spend 23 minutes a day on FB, up a minute from the current 22. Of course, Snapchat’s users aren’t slacking as 54% of them engage with the network daily and the average time spent is 18 minutes, meaning that this stands to be an area for competition in the not so distant future.
