Snapchat bothers a lot of people at a deep, emotional level.
It’s a very addictive platform prying on young (and old) brains with the help of all the tricks of behavioral psychology and neuromarketing.
Snapchat bothers so many folks in my generation (Xers), the generation before (Boomers) and even the generation after (Millennials) that many higher ed marketers are still in denial – despite the data.
Many higher ed executives refuse to see Snapchat for what it is: a growing social media and personalized broadcasting platform you can’t turn off or ignore if you target college students or young alums.
Twitter, Instagram and Facebook used the same playbook to win the attention game
All social media platforms started by making our personal lives easier, more convenient or more entertaining.
In its early days Facebook was all about connecting with your friends — and later with your mom or your grandmother.
Twitter was created as a text-only and quite public version of Slack. It was all about posting short updates to keep your coworkers in the loop about what you were doing, what you were eating – a sort of lightweight reporting platform to keep people sitting a few meters (or hundred of miles) from your desk updated about your universe.
Long before it was acquired by Facebook, Instagram wasn’t launched as a photo-sharing platform for brands and social media influencers. Nope, it was a nice place to share photos with your friends and make you look good in the process thanks to its cool filters turning your shots into beautiful professional-looking photos.
The top social media platforms of today have all followed the same playbook in their quest to conquer our digital world.
Chapter 1 in this playbook has always been about doing whatever it takes to become a big part in everybody’s life to win the attention game.
That’s why Mark Zuckerberg has kept saying for many years that Facebook wasn’t a social networking platform but a utility, the main conduit of our digital life, the platform powering and enabling (or blocking) all we do online.
Shareholders love utility companies, because they usually combined potentially unlimited revenue streams via recurring “payments” with a state of quasi-monopoly that let them raise “prices” when they want. As a user, you don’t pay, but advertisers increasingly do to buy your attention. An investor paradise indeed.
Snapchat: the best (bad) user interface to engineer user engagement and loyalty
Snapchat’s goal is very similar to Facebook’s. The only difference between Facebook and Snapchat (that once declined a billion-dollar acquisition offer from Facebook) is the core strategy used to become an essential part of our digital life.
While Facebook has always aimed at making itself the middle man powering and enabling our online activities from all our screens, Snapchat chose to get users hooked, addicted to the yellow ghost mobile app.
By designing a quest-like user experience that only the driven and invested few could master, Snapchat has led the way in triggering not just engagement but rapid – and somehow conditioned – loyalty.
Once a new user, pushed by her friends already using the platform, has leveled up at the “Snapchat game” after investing a lot of time to uncover different features and lost a few battles by sending the wrong pic to the wrong person, chances are she won’t abandon easily the app. The sunk cost (measured in time in this case) effect takes over and triggers the engineered loyalty you can see with Snapchat users.
When you invest your most precious resource (time which comes in limited quantity no matter how deep your pockets can be) into something, you start to build an emotional attachment, thus justifying your choice for this investment. This emotional attachment can be triggered.
The bright minds in Silicon Valley follow very closely and use broadly the latest research findings in psychology and neuroscience, so they put them to use in their app design.
What I and many have thought to be really bad design during our 1st, 2nd and even last user interaction with Snapchat is actually very, very smart design.
I didn’t realize it in the first place, because I was looking at it from a user perspective. I have been trained by many years of work on the Web. When the next option is only a click away, making things easy and user-friendly is an imperative.
In the mobile app ecosystem, switching from an app to another comes at a higher user cost. The top challenge on a smartphone is to get your app opened. So, it’s crucial to engineer this “opening habit” to create engagement but also ultimately loyalty, or its proxy in this specific case, Pavlovian conditioning.
Today’s digital world has turned into a giant psychological manipulative experiment we are all unwillingly taking part as we check Facebook, post a story on Instagram (more like Latergram now with its algorithmic feed) or add stickers and filters to our video messages before sending a Snap.
Get your school on Snapchat if it isn’t there yet
In this context, the rise and fall of social media platforms don’t follow the old playbook.
Big media publishers and brands have noticed. TV channels are all hands on the deck with Snapchat. They are all embracing the little ghost they love to hate. Other social media platforms have stolen borrowed the story format for this reason.
Stories are addictive and can deliver passive users waiting to be fed messages the way they were on TV before the interactive Web took over.
Whether we like it or not, Snapchat has redefined this game.
Schools in higher education that keep ignoring the fact won’t have soon any other choice than to buy ads on their campus edition of Snapchat Discovery, the program launched in partnership with college newspapers only a few weeks ago to start monetizing a very captive audience of college students.
So, why not start to build a captive audience of your own with the help of the little ghost?
Meet the Faculty: Karine Joly
Higher Ed Experts is a professional online school for digital professionals working in universities and colleges.
When you take a professional certificate course with us, you get a chance to upgrade your skills by working on your projects, interacting with classmates just like you and getting detailed personalized feedback from your instructor.
Karine Joly founded Higher Ed Experts in April 2007 and teaches Higher Ed Expert’s 8-week online course on Social Media Marketing for Higher Education.
She oversee the development of the professional development curriculum for the school. She shares her insights about emerging web and social media trends on collegewebeditor.com, a popular and independent blog launched in February 2005. She also authors the Internet Technologies column for University Business. Karine has presented on social media marketing, web analytics and online courses at leading higher ed conferences (CASE, American Marketing Association, EduComm, eduWeb, CUPRAP, HighEdWeb, PSEweb, UB Tech, etc.).
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