Facebook Messenger And Not SnapChat Will Be The Marketer's Tool Of Choice
Can Facebook Messenger put an end to Snapchat’s growing dominance with teens and millennials?
At least from a marketer’s perspective, the answer is a clear ‘yes’.
Consider a few key metrics. Despite an increase in the Snapchat user base to 100 million active daily users., Facebook messenger boast 900 million. While Snapchat has a majority of the younger user base, most of that base isn’t buying on the platform like their older Facebook counterparts. Worse, according to a NewsCred Quantitative study, 98% have never or rarely purchased a product they saw on Snapchat. That’s bad news for Snapchat marketers.
Consider also that while Snapchat boasts 800 billion video views a day, they are primarily peer to peer videos and they all disappear at the end of the day. Even if a brand could be involved in those videos , 55% of users report never or rarely engage with branded content (branded filters and stories), and only 36% occasionally interact with them.
Meanwhile Facebook Messenger is rolling out chat bots (automated, virtual agents) out to their huge install base of organizations that already have a sizeable fan base on Facebook. Moreover, unlike Snapchat, these bots will be allowed to link outside the platform and interact with a brand’s customers for sales purposes or customer service. That type of interaction isn’t in the DNA of Snapchat.
Those are just some of the reasons, and they don’t look good for Snapchat marketers. They bear out some of the analysis we did on Snapchat in March, which we discussed our own experience, “it’s simply not a marketer’s platform yet”. But now, with the introduction of Messenger bots, Facebook is making several moves to dip in Snapchat’s demographic not by introducing a “me too” version of Snapchat, but by enabling 3rd party developers to create their own programs to interact with users. This is a far better strategy that introducing 3rd party filters that can only be launched at specific locations (and they too eventually disappear).
But the introduction of bots only scratches the surface . To discover as a marketer, the real frustrations of the Snapchat platform, just try this simple experiment. Open up Snapchat on your mobile phone and try, really try, to identify a targeted user base for your business. You can’t. You can’t do it.
Last weekend, I visited my nieces and nephews and spent several hours with them. They are devoted Snapchat users and frequently take selfies and share videos with friends. I asked them how they would feel if a brand inserted an ad or a pre-roll video before their content and they looked at me with disdain.
Then I asked if they would watch brand stories from the Snapchat discovery tab so that I could closely observe how they interacted with them or at least how they tried to, until they gave up in frustration. “I can’t do anything with this except spam my friends with it,” my niece said, “I want to interact with them, not watch their advertisements.”
Snapchat is clearly, and clumsily, trying to sell some alternative version of advertising on a platform that originated for one purpose and has bolted on another.
I can just imagine the conversation the Snapchat executives had with the product development team when setting up the Discovery tab, “Our board wants to show some revenue to appease investors. So you need to create something quickly and sell it to brands with more money than common sense.”
After my visit with my nieces and nephews, I was reminded of an old Steve Jobs line, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” And Snapchat, I believed, has only the first part figured out – at least from a marketer’s perspective.
As with most new social networks unable to cope with the demands of marketers, Snapchat will continue to take shots in the dark, slowly interrupting the user experience until one day the users rebel and go someplace else. Think of MySpace, Xing, Friendster and Google+. In order to avoid this fate, Snapchat will need to make some changes to its product philosophy, and that may not sit well with its current user base.
Facebook, on the other hand, understands the future and how to balance the user experience with the needs of the marketer. They don’t build proprietary platforms or closed systems, they open up their platforms for developers to create new products and services that benefit the consumer and the marketer.
And so it is with Facebook Messenger. Messenger is programmed for the user but accessible by the marketer – but in a way that enhances and doesn’t detract from the user experience. In the case of bots, the user controls the dialogue and the bots respond. There isn’t a point where the user is being interrupted by an ad. The conversation is the ad (potentially).
I foresee bots that are part customer service and part marketer slowly leading a potential customer through a series of responses that take the user on a journey to purchase or one that disqualifies them as a potential customer. Marketing automation solutions already do this, bots will follow.
Bots will also help close the ecommerce desktop and mobile divide. These conversational bot user interfaces will enhance the user’s mobile experience where the real estate of the screen is limited. No one likes navigating for 15 minutes through a merchant site (even if mobile optimized) to buy a pair of jeans. Why would you go through the trouble of choosing the right jeans, deciding on the right size, adding it to the shopping cart, creating an account and entering a credit card number when a bot can access that information from your Facebook profile and do it all for you.
But why should marketers bet big on Facebook Messenger over Snapchat? You’ll hear from Snapchat pundits that it has superior engagement, it’s set up to be fun, and the ability to create shared experiences (stories) make the platform unique. And they’re right. But the answer is easy; there are tremendous revenue opportunities in Messenger, most likely billions and it’s going to happen sooner than you think. Snapchat has no such path laid out yet.
Over time, Facebook Messenger will start to enhance the user experience with Snapchat like functionality, and introduce other Facebook functionality like Facebook Live. Can you imagine a branded Facebook Live infomercial with bots answering questions and accepting payment for goods and services? I can, and it resonates with marketers more than
Facebook lives and breathes both the user and marketer’s perspective. It completely engineers its business practices, its systems, and its developers to support both. It’s not just Facebook’s business practices that are better for marketers, its understanding of how marketers work is superior in every way. And unlike Snapchat, it recognizes that marketers need to be a part of the platform, not a bolt on.
Yet history suggests that Facebook will cut organic transactions from marketers and install a toll situation, probably for bot transactions that involve payments. If you know this going in, you’ll be more prepared when it happens – because it will happen.
But for now, bots from 1-800-flowers, Shop Spring and soon Shopify are collecting payments. The experience is one dimensional, but second generation versions will undoubtingly work quicker and more intelligently.
Snapchat could have done all of this several months ago, and done it better. It still has the upper hand in engagement and has years of experience in the messaging app space. It still could, one presumes, turn to a similar model that mixes daily brand stories with customer support and ecommerce opportunities, but the company seems focused on providing brand filters and goofy face lenses.
I’m not shilling for Facebook or its Messenger app. My point is that Facebook is simply including the marketing aspect in the user equation so that it can be a sustainable and profit making solution. But Snapchat’s strategy seems to be, “Produce free features that we believe are useful to our user base, then cross our fingers and pray that some marketing sucker will pay for the exposure it generates.” That’s not a long-term, winning strategy, because eventually they’ll need to be profitable, and results driven marketers won’t spend their big budgets on small returns.
At the end of the day, it’s really a marketer’s bet between the known – Facebook, and the unknown Snapshot. Facebook has proven to be the best (outside of Google and YouTube) platform for marketers, so odds are that their Messenger platform will continue down that path. Snapchat on the other hand, will need time to experiment on how to appeal to marketers while not alienating their user base. As a marketer, you’ll need to wager on whether Snapchat is worth the risk and invest resources with a long-term, ROI perspective; or determine as I have, that Facebook Messenger is going to be an immediate winner and make the appropriate investments wager.
Let me know in the comments what your decision is going to be.
Source : Forbes
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