What Snapchat needs to do to stop me abandoning it for Instagram Stories

Dear Evan Spiegel, now that Instagram Stories are here, this is what you need to do to stop me from abandoning Snapchat.

I haven’t had a chance to play with the new Instagram Stories feature yet because it hasn’t been rolled out to me, but one thing I can tell from the demonstrations is that it could be a Snapchat killer. There are a handful of people I direct message on Snapchat, meaning my main reason for staying on Snapchat is being able to post as much as I like to my story and being able to watch other people’s stories at my leisure. If Instagram nails it’s new story feature (i.e. copies everything Snapchat has done with stories), then it could move a lot of Snapchat’s audience to them.

What can Snapchat do to keep me?

Discovery

The main thing that Instagram has over Snapchat, other than the fact that most of us already have an audience there, is that we’re discoverable. Anyone can type in my name or a business’s name and we’ve got a good chance of being discovered. They don’t need to know our exact handle to be able to add us. Don’t give me more Bitmoji’s, give me discoverability.

Sharability

Now this is somewhere that Instagram lacks as well. The ability to share content. Snapchat recently introduced a way for users to share their friend’s Snapchat accounts with other users. What I would love to be able to do is share individual pieces of content. For example, my story is public. I want as many people to see my story as possible. If I want you to reach out to my audience, I have to ask them to screen shot my username or snapcode and share it on their other social networks or on their story. What if on public Snapchat stories, there was a little share button for you to share that snap directly to your story or to send it to a friend. Not only do they add functionality that they’re lacking, but they add functionality that Instagram is lacking.

Groups

I often send the same snap to the same 3–4 people and wait for replies from each. If Snapchat were to add a group setting where we can all reply to each other’s snaps, that would probably pull me away from Whatsapp and Facebook messenger for some of my group conversations.

Your move, Snapchat

Snapchat has a limited time to act before Instagram start to pull users away from the Snaphat app. With Instagram’s strong 500million monthly active users about to be given access to Stories, it needs to act fast.

I’ll update this article once I’ve had a chance to play with the new Instagram feature. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Leave a comment and add me on Instagram and Snapchat.