Snapchat is close to rivaling Facebook in terms of video engagement with news that it is now accumulating over 4 billion video views per day.
This news, first reported by The IB Times and subsequently confirmed by the tech company, means that Snapchat has doubled its video traffic in the past three months.
Te metric comprises Live Stories shared by other users and media company accounts in a person’s feed.
This puts Snapchat into the same league as Facebook in term of video views. The way Snapchat delivers videos content suggests a higher engagement with their users than its more established counterpart.
The last time Facebook released video viewing metrics was April, when it too was hovering around the 4 billion daily views mark. Facebook interestingly included videos that played automatically in its data.
Snapchat users have to click in to each individual video in order to play it, which points to higher user participation.
Facebook famously had a $3bn bid for Snapchat turned down in late 2013. Snapchat has subsequently gone from strength to strength, becoming the communication app of choice for younger users, who don’t find their parents on the app.
Once of Snapchat’s biggest unique selling points is its impermanence, personal messages can only be viewed once and timeline videos only have a shelf life of 24 hours.
The mortality of Snapchat messages give the app a feel of being a more organic urgency, while at the same time more flippant and casual. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. This can leave slickly produced marketing content from rivals like Facebook and YouTube seem stale in comparison.
YouTube reached 4 billion daily views three years ago, but has since focused on user watch time as its key metric.
Snapchat’s meteoric increase in video views indicates that it is still growing and perhaps has a way to go before it peaks. To successfully engage with this younger demographic marketers are having to think outside the box and tap into Snapchats immediacy.
Irish brands still appear to only be dipping their toes in the water at the moment, but if successfully harnessed Snapchat will provide excellence engagement with a key demographic.
