Title says it all, really.
But seriously. I felt like such an old fogey after installing Snapchat. None of it came naturally to me.
(Why bother, you ask? Well, the high school student I'm mentoring, like everyone else her age, is all over it. Plus from a digital marketing POV, I figured I should probably get to grips with it as it seems set to stay.)
What I like about Snapchat is how it centralises a few different functions.
Chat/ messaging - as in, private, 1-1 communication. I think I originally thought it was photos and videos only, but plain old text chat works too. Who needs texts?
Stories - your own feed for public viewing by others (and vice versa). And there's even analytics! Who needs Instagram?
Live - if you're bored, kill a bit of time browsing stories of current events and such. I really like the featured city stories. I signed up to Snapchat shortly before Auckland was featured as a Life city last month (as an individual you can contribute your own snaps to these too) and since then, featured cities have included Bogota (a place I know nothing about but feel a little more familiar with now!) and Tokyo (where I'm going in a couple of months!). It is freaking cool. Something about these city life Snapchat stories just feels so immediate and real, even though they're usually not particularly exciting as such. Another highlight was the ComicCon live story. Okay, I still need Twitter and Facebook, but this is another entertaining distraction.
Plus, it's easy to add people on Snapchat. No faffing around with a string of numbers. Just get their username, or scan your phone over theirs. DONE.