Snapchat recently updated its app, and people are not having it.
Instead of improving features, this update has made the once user-friendly app extremely confusing. The app is now more geared toward benefiting advertisers than users, which is a huge mistake. Yes, Snapchat needs to make money, but at what cost?
If you drive away all of your users in an attempt to make more money, then you're going to lose the advertisers, too. If the customers go, then the businesses follow - it's simple, really.
So this update, if not resolved, could potentially cost them a lot of money in the future.
Snapchat had a lot going for them. They were their own kind of platform - not really a social media, yet people still were able to communicate with friends and share their lives with one another. This digital camera company has Bitmojis, filters, geo-filters, and so many ways to customize your "story."
I, personally, loved it. Parents and grandparents hadn't quite taken over the content yet. You could follow celebrities and view their stories alongside your friends'. It really felt like you had a connection with the famous people you followed because they were speaking directly to their fans. Now the celebrities have their own category with the magazines and advertisements, which ruins that feeling of a "relationship" that Snapchat was once able to provide.
People are now threatening to delete their Snapchat account; others are making jokes about going back to Facebook or MySpace as their social communication platform. I even saw someone on Twitter jokingly saying, "I'm protesting Snapchat until they fix this update. Hit me up on canvas if ya need me." Clearly these are jokes since MySpace isn't active anymore and Canvas is an online website where students submit homework for school, not a social platform, but what this all shows is how upset users are with the update.
Snapchat users are so upset, in fact, that there has been a petition created to remove the update. This petition has gained a lot of support as it is currently less than 100,000 signatures shy of reaching it's goal of 1 million.
This is bad PR for Snapchat.
According to USA Today, "The app currently carries an average rating of 1.9 out of 5 stars on Apple's App Store, although it remains the most popular app in the Photo & Video category."
Yikes.
Every day that Snapchat doesn't fix their update, they are digging their grave a little deeper. People can forgive, and Americans, in particular, are a forgiving society. Therefore Snapchat can recover from this, they just have to admit their wrongdoing and fix their mistake.
If I were them, I would immediately change it back to the old forum and then go from there. If it's necessary for them to have an update then they need to go back to the drawing board and start from there, but based on the reaction from users, what they already had was working well.
If it's not broke, don't fix it.
Sources
https://www.change.org/p/snap-inc-remove-the-new-snapchat-update
http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/12/technology/snapchat-update-backlash/index.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/02/13/nobody-seems-like-update-snapchat/330559002/