One of the key elements behind social media platform’s ability to succeed is maintaining relevance. The equation’s pretty simple—keep providing the tools and functionality that people want, and they’ll stick around.
The risk however, is if you stop innovating, another platform has the ability to come in and steal your audience’s attention. This is what happened to MySpace—Facebook provided similar functionality, but with more tools and features better aligned with what people wanted to do with their social networks. This is also why Facebook wanted to buy Snapchat in the app’s early days.
The takeaway? Platforms need to innovate, move with the trends and keep up with user expectations. This has been one of the major challenges for Twitter in growing its user-base, and why we’re seeing so many new tools and functions being added.
In order to do this more effectively, platforms need to maintain an awareness of trends. This is why the sudden popularity of new social messaging platform Peach matters.
Peach is a new messenger-style platform created by Vine founder Dom Hoffman . It’s being praised for its fun functionality, great on-boarding process and compulsive ease of use.
So, what’s so cool about it? It really comes down to the app’s “magic words” functionality. Type in a magic word, like “GIF.” Peach provides the capacity to search for and insert a GIF into your message stream without ever leaving the app. This in-app functionality makes sharing content with visuals such as GIFs a breeze.
Instead of taking the time to search high and low for the best visual to accompany your content, it’s already in the platform. Also, instead of taking the time to convert the image to fit your medium for sharing, it shares it automatically.
In addition to GIFs, you can also use effects to enhance your text with what Peach calls “draw.” Draw enables you to add a hand-drawn image to your stream. Another function called “shout” presents your text in huge letters with a colored background.
Peach is currently (and rightly) getting a heap of attention, but it isn’t clear if the app will find a home among the bulk of content sharers. It’s likely that Facebook and Twitter are already looking at Peach and working out ways to repurpose some of these ideas in their respective apps.
From a tech standpoint, it’s more likely that Peach’s attractive functions will serve as a signal to the bigger organizations as to what people are interested in. In this respect, it’s going to become increasingly difficult for the next big app to break through, as existing players will be able to evolve their features and keep people from migrating across wholesale. Snapchat succeeded, but it did so by introducing the type of significant differentiation required to gain traction and hold user attention beyond what’s possible in other, existing tools.
What do you think, PR Daily readers? Do you think you would use Peace for your content marketing strategies?
Andrew Hutchinson is a freelance writer, tech blogger and social media marketing advisor from Melbourne, Australia. A version of this article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
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