Messaging apps: What the new face of social media means for brands

Teens and young adults are leading the growth of messaging apps:

 

Privacy is the biggest factor driving younger audiences to protect their online privacy by controlling access to their online personas, removing concerns of parents, schools, or employers seeing their activity.

 

Disposability is another reason. Messaging apps make it simple to switch between online personas and groups, and drop them as desired.

 

It is also an informal medium to meet new people and share common interests while excluding unwanted messages and spam.

 

What can brands do to stay relevant?

 

Move messaging into fan experience: Line for instance found great success with stickers, celebrity brands offer an exclusive content to allow users to express themselves through the images, characters, or brands they love. As of February 2014, Line had over 500 sticker characters globally and is making roughly $18 million a quarter on sticker packs, and even more on in-game purchases. In April 2014, the Creators Market will begin to allow anyone to design, submit, and sell stickers on the Line store for 50 per cent of the profits—a shrewd move that will help penetrate new markets.

 

Paul McCartney’s Line account, which has over 10 million followers, released a set of eight exclusive stickers showing Paul’s face making various expressions. Stickers were free for the first few weeks and then offered at $1.99.

 

Getting native right: The ascent of messaging apps represents a desire for one-to-one and one-to-few communication instead of one-to-many. These apps are a haven where users talk to the people they care about most, and where there’s less pressure to have the community at large like or re-tweet everything.

 

This is an inherently tricky proposition for brands used to a broadcast approach, and most messenger services are keenly aware that traditional advertising—banners, video ads, and mass messaging—could erode user experience. On the whole, they are more inclined to experiment with “native” experiences.

 

For brands and apps alike, creativity will be required to get “native” right. Tango, perhaps the “blingiest” of the messaging apps that boasts of close to 200 million users and a penchant for wildly animated stickers that dance across the screen during video and text chats, is notably brand-friendly.

 

In late 2013, Tango launched “native” mobile ads which appear in the news feed and chat tab in the same card format as original content, but with a “sponsored” icon. Ads mostly drive app downloads for mobile games and other entertainment apps.

 

Enhance the conversation: Provide truly shareable, fun content that lets people connect. With branded stickers, the challenge is to create images that let users express themselves in likely conversational scenarios.

 

Create opportunities for fans to interact: The most popular game on Kik is called Costume Party, and it attracted over 1 million players in its first 24 hours. Built by a company called Koala, it asked users to draw costumes on top of photos of friends and to share them rapidly in one-to-one conversations. Brands could build this type of game to engage existing fans while reaching new audiences.

 

If you have to hard sell, give them something they really want: There have been successful coupon distribution and e-commerce campaigns on messaging apps, but they rely on giving users a notably exciting offer. Go beyond broadcasting typical messages about discounts or regular sales.