Is Facebook Feeling The Heat From SnapChat?

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is increasing focus on videos across its apps. In its recent earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO mentioned that its Facebook Live feature has seen significant growth in the past few months, with users going “live” from all seven continents and even outer space. The company is now prioritizing putting video first across all its apps as it believes that a camera will eventually become the primary input for users to share stories on social media. This comes close to the heels of Snapchat simplifying its mission statement to be a “camera company”. Recently Snapchat also launched a new gadget, “camera glasses” which can be used to capture images. The gadget can be synced with a phone so that users can share the images captured using these unique spectacles.  Facebook’s focus on video and initiatives to make video sharing easier appears to be an attempt to maintain its competitive edge over Snapchat – which is becoming increasingly popular among teens and millennials. While Facebook’s huge user base gives it a significant advantage over other social media players, Snapchat is growing rapidly on the back of video and image sharing. We dont believe Snapchat can be an immediate threat to Facebook. However, the latter is definitely looking at ways to counter the growth of Snapchat among young users, primarily due to smart image sharing features.

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Features Vs. Scale

Facebook is working on features which will simplify sharing videos on its main app. The company is working on a version of its app which will have a camera just one swipe away from the News Feed with creative effects for photos and videos. Facebook is also testing new camera and video features on its Messenger app and will experiment with more visual messaging tools in the near future. In its Instagram app, the company has improved the “Explore” tab to include more videos and stories. While it is easy for Facebook  scale up these changes to its  one billion+ users at a rapid pace, Snapchat with its innovative video features is gaining popularity. According to a recent report, Snapchat quadrupled its daily video views from 2 billion to 8 billion in the nine month period from May 2015 to February 2016, catching up with Facebook.  While these might not be exactly comparable, since certain reports suggest that Facebook views count after three seconds and Snapchat views count after milliseconds, it still indicates the popularity of the latter. As it continues to add features such as emojis and other interesting visual ways of sharing photos, Snapchat is the most popular social network among teenagers, according to a recent survey.  The company recently added “Speed modifiers” for videos which lets users add slow motion, fast forward and rewind features to the videos, ensuring that the short attention span of teenagers does not move them away from its platform.

Facebook’s increased focus on videos does appear to have spurred from the rapid growth of Snapchat and its increasing popularity. While Facebook does have a huge user base, it needs to guard its turf and cannot afford to lose teenage users to Snapchat. The company needs to innovate rapidly on the video sharing platform to stay ahead of competition. For now, Snapchat appears to have the lead in terms of features, but Facebook’s size puts it in an advantageous position. The company needs to leverage its scale and roll out innovative features to maintain its dominant position in the changing social media landscape.

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