Fifteen years ago, February 2004, when Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, social networking was an unknown phenomena. With Facebook’s arrival, a new dimension was added to the social platform. It emerged as the most popular social networking site within a few years of its inception. It emerges as a great social media platforms to connect, interact and share with friends and family any kind of information available today, but apart from these facts, it is evident that Facebook is losing momentum under the younger generation.
Behavior and trends have suggested that over the last couple of years, young people have deactivated their Facebook accounts and those who still have active accounts, rarely follow activities and events. Research has shown that people who have deactivated their accounts and removed the application from their phones are unlikely to return to the Facebook platform. The younger generation now possesses more of a buying power and many marketing corporations are curious to establish where these young people are spending their time. According to research, a significant number of young users deactivated their FaceBook account without any intent to return and about 44% of people between the ages 18 to 29 years have uninstalled FaceBook from their phone. The reasons why the younger generation is not utilizing these social media platforms are as follows:
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- People’s approach to social media platforms has changed. People now prefer to share things instantly and in real time, rather post and wait for a reply or response.
- They much more prefer storytelling and sharing updates by way of images and videos.
- FaceBook has many advertisements to which the young generation do not appeal to.
- Other social media platforms are introducing new features which specifically targets the younger generation, which features include stories, stickers, animations, emoji and many more. The young generation is more likely to interact with each other via YouTube, Snapchat and other messaging applications.
- Snapchat created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown, former students at Stanford University, is a multimedia messaging application used globally. It is developed by Snap Incorporated, a camera company.
- According to e-market data, Snapchat users continue to increase and if we look at the current trend in social networking, we find that Facebook is losing its charm because it is outdated compared to other social media platforms and as a result losing its relevance and thus the increase in users for Snapchat.
- Snapchat, a photo-sharing platform, which has introduced a lot of new features, like disappearing messages and attractive photo filters and features, has already attracted the younger audience and is becoming the most popular social media platforms.
- Snapchat is the trending social media platforms to connect with friends. By friendship profile, we can lock our best memories, messages and personal information over time. We can quickly find the highlights of our friendship. Friendship profiles are a private way to celebrate our personal relationships with each other. Moving forward, Snapchat will introduce friendship profiles to the user all over the world.
Snap camera syncs with the camera connected with our laptops and computers and works with some of the prominently used video sharing platforms like YouTube and Skype. We can record our own videos with the help of the Snap camera which in turn we can share on video streaming platforms like YouTube, Google Hangout, etc.
Basically, Snapchat is a platform designed to make people feel comfortable connecting and expressing themselves with friends and family. To prevent any kind of unwanted interaction, Snapchat has made it easy to connect only with whom we want to connect, however, it is impossible to stop the efforts of some people to find a way to infiltrate and bother users. In order to prevent this and support the prevention of cyberbullying, Snapchat has partnered with Ad Council and for this campaign, they have created Snapads to inform people of on and off-line bullying. They have also provided the facility to report the harassment on their application if people receive any offensive content on Snapchat.
To sign up for Snapchat you need to register with your required personal details. To add friends we can upload our contacts to search for people we know. We can also automatically add someone to our contact list by taking a picture of their Snap code which is a special QR code unique to each user.
On snapchat, you start communication through photos and not by written text and to start a conversation you need to tap the big camera circle and take a snap. There are many kinds of photo editing tools you can experiment with to figure out their function. Once you customize your snaps you can send the customized image to any of your contacts, or you can add it to your story, which is recorded on the day that our friends can view for a period of 24 hours. Snapchat also has group sharing and texting features.
Features of Snapchat:
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- Face lenses and word lenses:
These are the tools which can be added to the snaps and it looks like a part of the original photo shared on Snapchat - Geo filters:
Basically they are elements which determine the location of the user. These can be unlocked when a Snapchat user visits a particular place. In order to advertise their products, some business corporations use Geo Filters. - Snapcash:
Snapcash is a feature of snapchat which lets its users transfer money to their friends and relatives and basically the same as PayTM and Movikwik. - Memories:
Memories help the users to store their snaps as memories. - Snap store:
This is where you can buy snapchat related products and items. - Shazam:
This is a feature that can identify a song.
- Face lenses and word lenses:
From the above discussion we can conclude that with so many new features introduced by Snapchat, Snapchat has evolved as a great platform to interact with friends and family. It has given a new dimension to social networking in the present day. With so many new features Snapchat has become one of the most used social media platforms amongst youngsters which find the features like face lense, geo filters, snapcash, memories, etc appealing and it is gaining more popularity among the young generation who prefers Snapchat over Facebook.
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