Facebook and Snapchat have been just caught fighting the originality of content war, and Snapchat seems to be winning the ground. Smartphone app users post almost 100% original content on Snapchat while these figures cut down to 39% for the world's largest social network.
Facebook and Snapchat smartphone apps boast a staggering number of users. While Facebook remains supreme when it comes to the number of daily active users, it falls behind Snapchat by 43% when taking the originality of content into the account, SeekingAlpha reported.
This means that most of photos and videos posted on Facebook are shared from third-party sources, so the social network might be powerful in terms of popularity but the actual value is brought by original contents uploaded. This is where Snapchat is killing Facebook, because almost all videos shared with Snaps are original.
The website also highlighted that Snapchat users have approximately 15 times video engagement rate compared to Facebook. The author of the article argued that social media platforms are better measured by engagement rate rather than number of users. Besides, original contents are the stuff internet surfers value the most.
While Facebook's popularity cannot be ignored, the social network is losing its charm in terms of user engagement, which is also not profitable business wise because reduced engagement translates into increased ads shown per user. Snapchat in this regard is very successful because of the live contents sharable across friends and fans.
Snapchat's short-lived contents are also a brilliant strategy which forces people to check out the contents posted by their friends before it is deleted. Apart from that, it also encourages users to post more often to stay in the spotlight. This is exactly what Facebook is trying to accomplish with its new Live Video recently introduced, HuffPost highlighted.
Watching people doing random stuff in realtime is more interesting than viewing old videos. Snapchat allows users to share anything. Fom the dullest moments of waking up duck-faced to partying or face-swapping and users are rest assured that their contents will not be Googled out or uploaded to YouTube without their knowledge.
Snaptchat cannot beat the status Facebook enjoys today, but the later is clearly losing originality of contents. This YouTube video explains some aspects of this matter.