Rambling About Snapchat

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There's a, vacuuming sound in the background that you may hear which I am not about to I was just about to hit record then the vacuum started. I'm not about to go tell Sue that she needs to wait to vacuum for my podcast because if you've ever tried to vacuum and clean a house with two or three little children running around who constantly make more messes as you clean up one mess, you know that's podcast is the least of your concerns. So you'll hear a little bit of a low maybe in the background. Deal with it. I wanted to have a little ramble.

I was walking home from dropping my son off at school this morning and thought thinking more about Snapchat stuff and and just sort of have a little bit of a ramble about it since I don't have my own tech podcast to talk about things like this anymore. And and so I I just continue to find Snapchat as a platform really interesting. It's such a unique thing in this day and age with the Facebooks and the Twitters and the Instagrams, etcetera. Because there's very little effort made on the platform to give you stats and numbers of followers and likes and things that other social networks use to sort of to really feed your ego and keep you coming back just to like just to check and see how many people favorite that tweet you thought was really awesome or shared or liked your Facebook status or photo or whatever on Instagram. And and like there is views and you can get a list of names of people who viewed your snap but there isn't like a very quick and easy that I've seen anyways anywhere.

This is the number of followers you have, people who are following you. You can go through the list and add them up I guess and and you can you know, you can see the numbers of how many people follow have viewed a snap but it's not front and center and it's not something that they promote very much, that's for sure. And in order to get a snap even like sharing it outside of the network, of Snapchat, you have to know how to either take a screenshot of someone else's Snaps and save it and upload it somewhere or save your own Snaps which isn't like an easy it is, I mean, it's easy but it's not like again, a thing that they go out of their way to show you how to do which most other social networks kind of like encourage you to obvious for obvious reasons to share what you're creating on their thing so that people are wanna come and see it and check it out and Snapchat kind of goes the sort of like anti promotion way of just making a little bit weird, little bit hard to get to and in the hopes I guess that people will want to find out more about it because it's it seems kind of mysterious and, interesting that way.

Businesses can buy filters like a geo located filter, so you could go on a map and pick some coordinates say like I could you know around my office and buy a Snapchat filter that I designed to brand and market myself except even that is is limited in what you can promote. You can't I don't think you can put your account name or a Twitter handle. It's very unsort of marketing focused. You have to be creative with what you're doing and, make it interesting for the user is sort of put above the air quotes brands. And they seem very focused on try to make a platform that people will want to come and need to come to in order to see this stuff instead of going anywhere else.

That's why, you know, there's no web address. You can see someone's account on the web, but you can't go and view a snap on the web the way you can with Twitter. Instagram added a web interface a while ago, so you didn't have to just go to the app, you could see it on the web. You can't just on Instagram, you still can't post to the app from the web, which I think makes sense just but yeah, that's where again Snapchat is kinda like just it's a bit of like platform lock in, but it's also kind of this interesting, way of making it compelling to come to that platform, I guess. I don't know.

Normally when platforms try to lock you into their thing, it feels kinda like, no, I don't want that. Like Facebook, know, in the past would, you know, kind of lock you into their wall garden and they wouldn't allow it, make it very easy to share outside of Facebook, that kind of stuff. And maybe it's because with Snapchat, the things that you post there are so temporary. They don't last very, you know, ten seconds, four hours, that kind of thing. That it doesn't feel that bad to have a bit of lock in there.

The discover stories from brands like, you know, BuzzFeed, IGN, Mashable, Comedy Central, etcetera, are interesting at times where there's absolutely no reason at all, nothing forcing you to look at them unless the companies make the videos compelling enough to watch. And I'll periodically watch like IGNs or Mashable for a bit of tech stuff and whatever. But there's nothing there forcing me to watch them other than if I choose to tap on the icon and watch. But obviously from what I've read and and the fact that they keep producing and adding more people, more brands to that that sort of discover story section, it is there's enough eyeballs going to them that people are willing to produce because it is it takes a lot of time for a company like Mashable or whoever to put together a specific story just video for this match for, Snapchat because it's a very unique kind of format. It's not necessarily they can repurpose a bit of content from maybe a YouTube channel or whatever, but it's a very unique kind of format that you have to be portrait style video and lo fi, not high def kind of stuff and that you have to sort of make compelling within those constraints.

Like I say in my Snapchat course tutorial, which you can find a link in the show notes of course, the app is deliberately unfriendly to the point that it's almost like rude and makes you feel stupid for even trying to use it. It's it's scary too. You open it up and all you see is the camera view. There's no social stream to watch or view of other people to get an idea of what you might snap. When you sign up for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etcetera, they go out of their way to get you following other people as soon as possible and viewing the stream of info so you get an idea of like what kind of the language of the app and and the way that you the kind of photos you might post and that kind of stuff.

And Snapchat seems to deliberately thumb their their noses at that. So for now anyway, I I really hope that they succeed and and don't have to cave to investor pressure to just to follow the same path as all the other social network apps. They I I haven't seen any real hard numbers that they've released as far as profits and and you know, all that kind of stuff. I don't follow a lot of that tech that deep of, dive of tech stuff but, just curious. It's such an interesting platform because of those things and, and I'd encourage you to check it out if you haven't already.

Obviously, have a slightly slight vested interest in maybe promoting Snapchat because of this course that I have but I can assure you I am not getting rich quick or slowly or ever off of the back of this course. But, the the course I made is is basically just deliberately or like to help people check it out without being because it is like I said, so scary and and kinda, confusing to use at first and so maybe a course watching someone else show you how to use the app and the service will make you a little more comfortable with it and wanna check it out. Because it is just at the end the day, it's just kind of a fun app. It's not there's not a lot of, like I said, not a lot of markety business y reasons to use it. There's some but for most people, just have a little bit of fun with it and don't feel the social pressure of putting on your best face, writing your best tweet, etcetera.

So for now, I'm Chris Enns. You're listening to Daily ish on goodstuff.fm. You can follow me on Twitter at I Chris. Good stuff is goodstufffm on Twitter and you can find this show and many others like it. Goodstuff.fm/daily(ish)/170one.

Thanks for listening. Have a great day. Bye.