The four-year-old social network Snapchat, which has been desired by giants like Facebook, has introduced a new feature that will make the process of adding friends much easier. Since Saturday, users are able to create personal URLs that can be sent to their friends.
Previously, users had to use a personalized Snapcode, a phone number, or an username in order to add friends –which turned out to be complicated. As a response, the social network, created by three young Stanford students, added a new function that will permit people to create URLs that can directly show their friends their personal accounts.
In 2015 Snapchat reported that it has surpassed the barrier of 100 million daily active users. That being said, 65 percent of those daily active users contribute with new content everyday, which makes Snapchat a social network with very engaged users.
It was reported that a significant segment of Snapchat users have their usernames attached to their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles. However, when someone wanted to add a friend, they needed to leave the app that they were using and write the name on Snapchat. With the new URLs feature, users can just simply attach the personal direction to their profiles and people will add them, just by clicking on the link.
“A key value for me, is about having fun or being playful. Everyone’s so serious in technology,” Snapchat CEO, Evan Spiegel, said to the Daily Mail.
To make things easier, Snapchat added a new button that says “Share Username”. When users click on it they have the option of sharing their personal URL through email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp. In order to enjoy the new features, users need to update the app to its latest version.
It appears that because the engagement of its users, posts on Snapchat are extremely effective. Last year Nasdaq created an account at the social network in order to publish stock market information, graphics and news, before they were displayed in bigger platforms. Nasdaq said posts on snapchat perform twice as well as other posts.
In 2015, Fortune calculated that the market value of Snapchat is $19 billion, which makes it the third most valuable tech startup in the United States, when counting the companies that do not trade their shares publicly.
Analysts are expecting a great economic performance for the company headquartered in Los Angeles. Even when it has not implemented yet an advertising model, it has 6 billion video views per day, which are not that far from the 8 billion views per day that Facebook said it has, considering that the latter has a huge base of 1.01 billion daily active users.
Source: Snapchat