Snapchat is gearing up for the new year with a few changes and updates on the favored social media platform.
Executives of Snap Inc. shared major redesign plans for 2018 at Tuesday’s earnings call. Additionally, they want to take care of Snapchat users and creators. Although they stopped short of sharing too many details, they dropped a few hints about their plans.
Snapchat will become simpler, and more easier to use. “One thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use,” said CEO Evan Spiegel Tuesday. “As a result, we are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use.” The new design is already being tested internally, and will be tested among a group of users before it’s released.
Discovery of Snapchat stories will be personalized based on behavior. Similar to Twitter and Facebook, Spiegel has plans to make it easier for people to discover what they want to watch or what they’re interested in. “Ultimately, what we found is that the best predictor of what people are interested in and want to watch is actually what they’re watching,” he said. “I think there’s an opportunity here for us to create a really great personalized content service.”
Creators will be getting paid for their stories. Snap currently partners with a small group of media partners. The company plans to allow many more users to create money from their stories. Spiegel said “In 2018, we are going to build more distribution and monetization opportunities for these creators in an effort to empower our creative community to express themselves to a larger audience and build a business with their creativity.” This feature will tie into the discovery of personalized stories.
Anyone will be able to create lenses. Snapchat has been killing the game with their dynamic filters. Instagram and Facebook have tried to imitate this feature, but Snap reigns in this area with their partnership with Bitmoji. “We are working hard to democratize Lens creation so that anyone anywhere can create and publish their own Lenses,” said Spiegel. “We can’t wait to see all of the Lenses created by our community!”
Snapchat plans to be Android friendly. Android user’s stories have always been a pain to watch. The company is looking to change that for next year. “To attract more Android users, we are building a new version of our Android application from the ground up that we will launch in select markets before rolling it out widely,” Spiegel said. A new version of the Android app is already being tested internally.
Snapchat wants to expand to a global market and older users. The company has prided itself in being attractive to users who are 34 years old or younger. In addition, its focus was on U.S. based users as well as other English speaking countries. However, considering that the user growth is slow they want to appeal to more users. Said Spiegel: “In order to further scale our user base, we need to accelerate the adoption of our product among Android users, users above the age of 34, and users in the rest of world markets.”
