How Snapchat Capitalizes on Our Short Attention Spans

You’ve got four seconds to check this out. Take it or leave it.

The temporary nature of Snapchat’s content differentiates it from every other communication platform. In today’s multi-device world, everyone juggles their lives at full speed ahead, reading headlines and managing their lives across a bounty of platforms and social media accounts. In the midst of this constant frenzy, Snapchat has capitalized on a new currency: attention.

Attention is the New Currency

Let’s face it. In 2016, we even skim our daily news digests instead of taking a couple of minutes to get through the soundbites. No one reads longform articles anymore, and if they do, they take breaks to tab over a few screens and check Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter feeds. In the battle for social media engagement, emphasizing conversions may be jumping the gun. You have to capture users’ attentions first, and Snapchat is way ahead of competitors in this regard, in part because of the very nature of users’ relationships to the app.

Earlier this year, Danah Boyd, the founder and president of Data & Society, wrote:

“In a digital world where everyone’s flicking through headshots, images, and text without processing any of it, Snapchat asks you to stand still and pay attention to the gift that someone in your network just gave you.”

How Snapchat Wields Your Undivided Attention

Snapchat uses constraints — the mere seconds you are allowed to view a message — to get you to zone in exclusively on their content. As a result, Boyd continues, “I watch teens choose not to open a Snap the moment they get it because they want to wait for the moment when they can appreciate whatever is behind that closed door. And when they do, I watch them tune out everything else and just concentrate on what’s in front of them.” What other app or activity wields users’— especially teenagers’— completely undivided attention? Snapchat commands focus, leaving no room for multitasking or distraction, something that cannot be said of Facebook or even Instagram, where you implicitly have a number of different alternatives to which you might devote your attention.

Is Snapchat the New Facebook?

According to Bloomberg, people are using Snapchat today like they were using Facebook in 2005. With just 100 million users, Snapchat delivers more than 7 billion video clips every day. By comparison, with over 1.5 billion users, Facebook only delivers 8 billion daily video views. That bang-for-your-buck impact shows how Snapchat, once thought of as just another fleeting messaging app, is winning the engagement battle by first capturing its audience’s undivided attention and offering personalized, concentrated content that users feel absolutely compelled to view.

It’s interesting to remember that Snapchat was still branded as a “sexting app” just a few years ago. While a bit of a lewd origin story, that very intimacy actually works to the advantage of many businesses and brands looking to get into the Snapchat game. The app is, by nature, personal — content is sent directly and specifically to you — and Snapchat’s newly updated UI lets advertisers and publications capitalize on that by presenting content as snaps, which feel personal while still leading the user to the branded content.

Snapchat for Business

Snapchat has some of the highest ad conversions of any social media platform, in part because the platform itself is making significant transformations in order to make headway with new users and develop a business model. The company’s new updates include a more intuitive user experience while reducing the risk that users miss valuable content and optimize the potential for conversions through attention capturing. Whether it’s the ability of Snapchat’s media partners the ability to deep link to their Snapchat content, the update allowing individual users to deep link to their own Snapchat channels with profile URLs, or the new ability to make in-app purchases, Snapchat is clearly making a big push to become not only a hugely popular messaging app but also a great source of ad content for businesses and brands.

The Future of Snapchat

Snapchat’s move towards greater discoverability is doing exactly that, while still maintaining its intimate, attention-grabbing foundation. This indicates that as the company matures, it will focus on breaking down barriers to entry. By making it easier for people to discover content (but still holding onto the ephemeral messages), Snapchat is becoming accessible—and mainstream—for an even wider audience. If this progress holds true, then this is the year we’ll see Snapchat continue to age up, step even further ahead of other platforms as a marketing tool, and show everyone that in today’s chaotic multi-device world, attention is the dominant currency. Other tools might continue to get you X number of subscribers and Y number of views, but Snapchat is the only platform that can promise to consistently capture user focus.

How do you plan to incorporate Snapchat into your company’s marketing strategy?