Last year, I attended the SXSWedu, the education track of the iconic American expo held every year in Austin, Texas. A recurrent theme there was how social media is impacting education and although much was said about social media overall, significant focus was put on the rise of ephemeral social media; that is, social media that is visible for a very short period of time and then supposedly goes away forever.
The running joke was that Millennials and their kids are moving away from ‘Fossilbook’ and ‘Instagrandma’ to more ephemeral social media such as Snapchat. While much of the conversation centred on how kids would use ephemeral social media and its inherent risks (online privacy and bullying), the underlying message was that ephemeral media has become an established part of life, and educators and businesses need to start using it to connect with the next generation.
Although businesses have, to some extent, used ephemeral media to connect with Millennials and young customers, the jury is still out on what qualifies as success in this area. When ephemeral social media came on the scene with the launch of Snapchat in 2011, few thought that social media with impermanence as the USP would gain traction as a marketing medium. Six years later, those detractors are eating crow. Snapchat today has an active user base of 100 million, handles 400 million pictures a day and has a market valuation of $25 billion (source: Bloomberg); not bad for something that started life as a class project for a bunch of Stanford university geeks.
The success of Snapchat seems to indicate that a short shelf life is the way to go. Many in the marketing industry have struggled to rationalise what makes the app (which now ranks among the top 10 in all mobile ecosystems, iOS and Android included) tick. The initial reaction was that the app was a fringe phenomenon popular among teens and Millennials who wanted to post temporary content – and would, in fact, turn out to be a passing phase.
The success of Snapchat seems to indicate that a short shelf life is the way to go.
This too proved to be an erroneous starting point. As the popularity of ephemeral media grew, even traditional social media outlets got into the act of impermanence. Instagram launched ‘Stories’ (the move was a runaway success) and in just over five months gained a user base of over 150 million active users, causing the parent company Facebook to launch a similar ‘Stories’ feature on their newsfeed. The advertising response too has been most encouraging and over 74% of US companies now have a presence on Instagram since the launch of Stories (up from 53% last year).
So what has attracted Millennials to ephemeral media? Many experts believe that the impermanence of the marketing message, if positioned well, strikes the right chord. The key in their opinion is the nature of the content and more importantly, how it is curated. According to some experts, content curation on ephemeral social media is following the same pattern digital photography did. Before going digital, the focus of photography was to have a few select pictures saved for posterity with the rest of the experience stored as a cherished memory. However, with the advent of digital (particularly with mobile phone cameras), we came to a point where every moment was photographed in a million snaps. Ephemeral media has simply moved content creation along the same curve, striking a new balance whereby important events can be instantly shared for a short period, thus demanding immediacy of attention.