I'd rather be Keeping up with Crypto than the Kardashians, but Kylie just flexed her influence in Social Media
She recently tweeted that she misses the old Snap Chat and doesn't open the popular app anymore. I thought that wasn't a big deal, but on Thursday it lead to a wide sell off of Snap Chat stock and wiping off over $1 Billion of its market value. After looking at the stock market it was confirmed that a single tweet did that much damage. Snap Chat must be in damage control; its crazy to see the power an influencer has on a publicly traded company. It makes sense since she is most likely one of the more prominent names on the platform and her fan base is Snaps target market.
I would have to agree the new layout for Snapchat is rather overwhelming with a cluster of everything. In addition, since Instagram launched stories a while back, I personally have not found the need to go back to Snap. Its like the old saying, "if it aint broke, dont fix it", Snapchat had something different than Instagram and facebook. Allowing friends, us, normal people to share short clips with each other or to our friends of whatever we wanted and then it was gone forever. It made each direct snap to your friend more personal and meaningful when you could only view it once. As they kept evolving, introducing story's and filters those were great additions to the platform which differentiated it from their competition. However like most businesses, they lost sight of what made them "cool" and original in order to focus and only care about the bottom line and it's stake holders.
SNAP Chat lost its authenticity as it kept making it more about business than it did about peer to peer social interaction. Imagine if the business had to just organically grow their channel, that would have made the brand grow their influence which would be real and Snap would have kept its reputation. Could this be the next Vine?
Not sure, but I would have sold the company to instagram when they had the opportunity. Lets see what happens..
Bloomberg Article - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-22/snap-royalty-kylie-jenner-erased-a-billion-dollars-in-one-tweet