It’s a crowded field of social media apps that live on our devices and compete to suck the time out of our days. But a new study says Millennials reserve the most love for Snapchat – a tool that lets people create vanishing video snippets of their lives.
The study surveyed college students across the U.S. and found that students will opt to open up Snapchat before every other social media app, including Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, according to LendEdu, an online marketplace for student loan refinancing.
For now, let’s overlook the debate over whether college students today even count as Millennials or whether they’ve carved out a generation of their own – dubbed Gen Z. Among this young crowd, 58 percent of those surveyed said if they saw a cluster of social media notifications on their phone, they’d tap into Snapchat first. That’s compared to 27 percent who would choose Instagram, 13 percent who said Facebook, and 2 percent for LinkedIn.
“Checking Snapchat has become a ritualistic occurrence for most millennials, a demographic coveted by nearly every single company in existence today,” LendEdu stated in the study.
The results are pretty impressive given the app’s relatively small audience size. Social media heavyweight Facebook sees a whopping 1.8 billion users monthly compared to Snapchat’s meager 158 million. For another reference point, even Twitter eclipses Snapchat with 319 million monthly active users.
Analysts are watching the stock closely, with pessimists predicting the price to follow the same fate as other troubled startup stocks like Twitter and GoPro. Whether Snap, Inc. can avoid the same fate will be determined largely on whether they can convert the high level of engagement among younger users into real advertising dollars.
So Snapchat doesn’t have the largest user base out there but engagement is high among younger users. It’s probably welcome news to parent company Snap, Inc., which has been struggling through a disappointing IPO as of late. The company went public on March 2nd to much fanfare and a first day closing price at $24.53. Despite all that initial enthusiasm, the stock price has been declining steadily with a price at $19.54 as of closing on Friday, March 17.
