Snapchat Copycat…Again

Instagram is at it again copying Snapchat (read past blog posts I’ve written on the subject here and here). If you didn’t hear, this week Instagram copied the last thing from Snapchat they hadn’t already…face filters. It was only a matter of time before this happened, since when Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, launched Facebook Stories (still a failure, by the way), the face filters were already present.
So is this the end for Snapchat? I don’t think so, at least not yet. Although its parent company, Snap, has had a bit of tumultuous year. Let’s recap:

• Instagram copied essentially every feature Snapchat Stories offered, right down to the name.
• Facebook then did the same thing.
• Snap went public in March and reported $2.2 billion in losses in their first quarter since then. Apparently a lot of these losses just come with compensation costs it takes to go public. But their losses were doubled from the same quarter in 2016.

Even with that, I think both Instagram and Snapchat have a totally different audience base. But Snapchat is going to add something new and exciting to add more users, especially since Instagram Stories has more users than Snapchat does as a whole (includes Stories users and users who don’t use Stories).
If you remember, Snap launched Spectacles in 2016, a pair of sunglasses that also recorded video and posted it to a user’s Snapchat story. But since its initial launch, I’ve barely heard anything about it. If Snapchat wants to stay a competitor, they’d better really think about their strategy and what they can add to bring in more users in the next year.
And, Instagram—we know what Snapchat has is great, it’s why you copied them and why Stories have been so successful on Instagram’s platform, but maybe think of your own idea for whatever is next for Instagram Stories? Make Snapchat want to copy you.
And Facebook, I think it’s time to rid your platform of Stories altogether (you should have never introduced it there to begin with).