I Don’t Know How to Use Snapchat
I think this can attest to how central Snapchat is in Millenial culture because my inability to use Snapchat has severely crippled some of my relationships.
Snapchat has evolved into something that can never be replaced by Instagram’s constant idea theft (that’s a story for another day), it is the most intimate social network to date. Nothing can compare to it in terms of intimacy.
But I don’t know to use the damn thing anymore. I don’t take selfies, I suck at taking selfies (I have a mean dog face filter game though). In it’s early days I was a heavy Snapchat user, using it as a way to share small pieces of my day with close friends. When the story feature came I thought to myself “great, a way to make sure I don’t forget to send it to everyone”, but then Snapchat introduced stories from magazines and other media outlets and every company started to use it as a form of guerilla marketing to Millenials. That’s when it just got too much for me.
Snapchat still has a lot of appeal to me, I usually tap through all of my friends’ stories throughout the day and before I go to bed, but it’s just too much. The capacity to use it as this vlogging tool scared me away from creating content on a platform that I originally saw as this intimate space for me and people close to me. I rarely send actual snaps and most of your interaction with me if you snap me will be through the text feature (which I force myself to use as a means to maintain ‘bestfriend’ status with my girlfriend because that actually matters in 2017 [I’m not kidding, that actually matters to me]).
I get posed with questions such as ‘why don’t you Snap me?’ or ‘why don’t you ever post on your story?’ on a regular basis and the answer is, I really don’t know how. I lost my identity on Snapchat and I think that’s a really big part of using any social network — having an identity on it, knowing what you yourself would post on it.
This could be one of the reasons so many people made a full transition to Instagram stories (I’m not one of them), but you have to admit that Snapchat’s image has gone from some cute little startup to fledging social network that has room for big business to really use it for social marketing.
-Kyle
