How Young Millennials Are Using Snapchat

DAILY REAL ESTATE NEWS | THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2016

Snapchat boasts over 100 million daily users who view 7 billion videos through the social network on a daily basis.

While Snapchat was once thought of as a social channel used primarily by young millennials for messaging with friends, recent changes have shown that its highly-coveted user base is increasingly using the app to engage with content from news organizations and businesses.

This evolution in how young people use Snapchat means that now is a great time for agents or brokerages to familiarize themselves with this social platform, and especially how younger millennials engage with it. 

Read more: Do You Need to Save Your Client Snapchats?

Variety reported that in their February survey of 1,117 Snapchat users aged 13-24, around 44 percent of respondents who interact with the Live Stories and Discover features do so at least once a day.

Snapchat's Live Stories are a compilation of snaps (photos and videos) from specific events and locations all over the world. Its Discover tab features content from top brands and publications like Buzzfeed, MTV, Cosmopolitan, ESPN, and Comedy Central, among others.

Brands with an older demographic like The Wall Street Journal are among the least popular on on Snapchat Discover, though the placement of brands that skew older could be an opportunity. In fact, over 50 percent of survey respondents said that they first became aware of brands like Vox, Fusion, and Mashable due to them being featured on Snapchat Discover.

Of those users who checked Snapchat multiple times a day, 48 percent said they viewed snaps and snap stories from brands, 47 percent interacted with snaps or stories using the Discover feature, and 44 percent looked at local live stories and events, Variety reports.

Snapchat is growing as a way for this cohort to keep up with news. The survey revealed that 36 percent of users consider Snapchat to be their primary source for entertainment news. 28 percent say that Snapchat is their main source for keeping up with current events, and 30 percent have used Snapchat to get news on the Presidential election.

As Snapchat moves away from being simply a messaging app, younger millennials will see it as an easy way to learn about new products and brands, keep up with the latest news, and interact one-on-one with friends and businesses alike.

For agents, it appears that now may be the right time to give Snapchat a try, so they can start connecting to and understanding the next generation of home buyers.

Source: "Snapchat Content Survey: How Much Millennials Actually Use Live Stories, Discover and More," Variety (March 24, 2016)