Author: Andrew Hutchinson / Source: Social Media Today Last week, Facebook opened up access to their latest Snapchat clone – ‘Messenger D
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Last week, Facebook opened up access to their latest Snapchat clone – ‘Messenger Day’ – to all of Messenger’s billion plus users, prompting a wave of hot takes and criticism, with many suggesting that the company has gone too far in its battle for attention with Snapchat, that they’re overdoing the Snapchat-like angle.
But two things:
One – opinion matters less than user numbers.
You might think that everyone will hate Messenger Day, that Facebook has made a big misstep, that it’ll likely hurt Messenger’s performance – but all of that will bear out in the actual user data.
Many criticized Facebook’s most blatant Snapchat rip-off – Instagram Stories – when it launched, but now more than 150 million people use it every day. That’s a quarter of Instagram’s active user base now spending more time and posting more content within the app – while the app’s overall user growth has also increased at a faster rate than at any other time in its history. Safe to say the criticism, in this case, was off target.
Two – Facebook runs large-scale tests of all such additions before a bigger roll out.
Messenger Day is obviously new to the majority of users, but it’s been available in Australia and Poland for five months, two nations which, combined, have close to 30 million social media users, a significant test group which has no doubt provided Facebook with a heap of feedback.
If the feedback was negative, if there was a reduction in time spent in the app, if people hated the addition, do you really think Facebook would have given it a wider release?
That’s not to say that Facebook is infallible – reports this week, for example, suggest that they’ve dialed back their emphasis on their Snapchat-clone within WhatsApp – nor does it mean that Messenger Day will be a sure-fire hit, but Facebook have a refined testing process in place. They don’t make such decisions on a whim.
They may still make mistakes, but they’re fairly educated bets. The fact that Messenger Day is being given a larger release would suggest that those initial tests have produced good results – don’t be surprised if Messenger Day sees big adoption in Facebook’s coming performance reports.
In line with this, we now have news that Facebook’s latest Snapchat-like test, this time…
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