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Snapchat redesign meets with unimpressed reviews from early users

Snapchat redesign meets with unimpressed reviews from early users

As Snapchat seeks to reignite user growth, its redesign has split content from people's friends from that created by media companies and other professional creators.

Is it going down well? Not according to analytics firm SensorTower, which tells TechCrunch that 83% of early App Store reviews for Snapchat's redesign are one or two stars out of five.

Snap, Inc CEO Evan Spiegel had claimed in a guest column for Axios that with the new design "we are separating the social from the media, and taking an important step forward towards strengthening our relationships with our friends and our relationships with the media".

There don't appear to be many friendly thoughts in the reviews thus far from Snapchat users, with SensorTower claiming the three most-common phrases in the negative opinions are “new update”, “Stories”, and “please fix”. Ouch.

The stories issue is that Snapchat stories have been split up across the app, with those from non-friends – influencers included – now positioned alongside media companies' content in the Discover section of the app, while friends' stories are mixed in with messages.

As yet, influencers don't appear to be on the warpath over the impact on their audiences within Snapchat, although with the redesign still rolling out globally, its impact hasn't been felt in countries like the US.

It's one of the laws of the internet that whenever a big social network changes its design, there's an instant backlash online from people who preferred it the old way. The real test is whether the outrage settles down or intensifies over the following weeks.


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Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)