• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Real Entrepreneur News

Daily Entrepreneur News

Snapchat takes on TikTok with launch of Lens Challenges

December 19, 2018 by News Desk Leave a Comment

Snapchat takes on TikTok with launch of Lens Challenges

Snapchat is looking to increase user engagement with the app with the launch of a new feature called Lens Challenges. Users can opt to participate in the challenges by creating a snap with a Lens that’s themed to a particular song, dance, holiday, event, and more, the company explains.

For example, one of the first challenges to launch is a sing-along with Gwen Stefani’s “Jingle Bells.”

Users access the new challenge from the Lens Explorer section of the app, then lip sync along with the song. When finished, they’ll send the snap to the Gwen Stefani Challenge story for the chance to be featured in the app.

While this particular challenge was designed by the company itself, others will be created by community members. Also new today is one called the “Disappear” challenge, created by Snapchat user Jye Trudinger. In this one, users are prompted to take two photos that superimpose, in order to make the photo’s subject disappear.

Users can also watch others’ Challenge Snaps while in Lens Explorer. But the Challenges don’t have to be public – they can also be privately shared with your friends, if you prefer.

The company hopes that more creators will create challenges going forward, as it will help them to grow their own audience and engage their fans.

The new feature seems to be inspired by TikTok, the rapidly growing social app where things like song, dance and lip sync challenges are the norm. TikTok has been surging in recent months following Bytedance’s acquisition of Musical.ly, which allowed it to merge the latter’s customer base with its own. That led TikTok to surpass Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in downloads last month.

Snapchat, meanwhile, has been struggling this past year to recover from a rushed redesign plus declining engagement and revenue per user, among other things. The company in Q3 lost 2 million users, but its user base is still up year-over-year, so there’s a chance for a recovery from some of its missteps.

Since its launch, Snapchat has seen Facebook steal some of its best ideas for its own, like Stories – which are now one of Instagram’s defining features. Stories have also become something of an industry standard the way Facebook’s News Feed format has – they’re now found everywhere across the social web from LinkedIn to YouTube. So if Snap is now the one borrowing from a  buzzy app aimed at its same tween to teenage customer base, that may not be its worst idea, even if it’s slightly less original.

Published at Wed, 19 Dec 2018 20:16:53 +0000

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • IBM CEO Arvind Krishna wants to completely transform his organization
  • Accelerators embrace change forced by pandemic
  • Apple updates Mac Mini with Apple-designed M1 chip
  • A theatre of dominance
  • HBO releases a wellness-focused AR app to promote ‘His Dark Materials’

Recent Comments

    Archives

    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018

    Categories

    • News
    • Video

    Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org

    Copyright © 2021 · News Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in