Preventing Others From Copying Its Features, Snapchat Becomes A More Open Social Media

Snapchat has experienced rough times, with its Stories feature blatantly copied by Facebook, Instagram and others.

To prevent those copycats to make use of the Stories trend to further push Snapchat out of the equation, founder Evan Spiegel finally found a way to fight back against Mark Zuckerberg’s army of clones.

Previously, Snapchat has attempted to foolishly confront Facebook using its own means, with Spiegel claiming that "Our values are hard to copy."

However, Snapchat never really see the benefit of such struggle, as its Stories feature has been copied and tweaked, across all of Facebook properties.

The clones have been used by more than 1 billion times daily across Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, a staggering number if compared to Snapchat’s 186 million total daily users.

Acknowledging this, Snapchat scrambles to find a way to put an end to its misery.

Read: Facebook, Instagram Vs. Snapchat: Copying To Eliminate The Threats

Here, the company is trying to take back the control of its destiny, by using the Snap Kit.

The strategy involves Snapchat in rallying up other social media networks, allowing them to embed its features, to prevent them from building their own copies of Stories.

This Story Kit can be used on Snapchat Stories so other apps can use them. This way,.users can display a more traditional carousel of their friends’ Stories, or embed them into their app in a custom format.

For example, Houseparty’s Stories carousel can share what friends are up to outside of the group video chat app, and Tinder can show off users' Snapchat Story alongside their photos to seduce potential matches.

This is like the company in rearranging the adage of "if you can’t beat them, join them" into “to beat them, join us.”

Here, Snapchat wants to again face Facebook, but rather than playing it using its own rules, Snapchat adopts Facebook's strategy.

Facebook has been able to colonize the web using its Like button. This particular feature can be embedded across the web and apps, allowing the social media giant to expand its reach beyond its normal capacity.

Snapchat here, is doing that exact same thing, but with the Stories feature.

What differentiate the two is that, Snapchat considers privacy in much better ways than Facebook.

Snap’s strong privacy record can lure partners to host Stories, where they might have feared that Facebook could tarnish their brand.

As a result, Snapchat can prevent other apps from cloning its features, which can further fragment the Stories feature.

This way, Snap can also save developers the slow and costly hassle, while providing them the tools they need to boost their own engagement, without having the drawbacks Facebook and its properties may have.

What's more, despite having much less users than all of its competitors, Snapchat excels in having the majority of its users coming from the young generations.

Spiegel knows that Snapchat reaches more of that younger age group than Facebook in the most lucrative countries: the U.S., Canada, U.K., France and Australia. This is the group that Facebook has massively neglected.

Other strategies, include more AR features for lenses, updated Snap original content, and a a multiplayer gaming platform.

In other news, Snapchat has also improved its Android app.

Previously, Snapchat on Android has long been criticized for being inferior to the iOS version available for those with Apple devices. The overhaul here, should should come as welcome news to many Android owners.

Fighting Facebook is never an easy task.

Competitors who faced the giant, can either be acquired, or squashed under its massive boots.

So here, the underdog Snap needs all the help it can get if it ever wants to earn even a substantial and sustainable position in the social networking industry in years to come.

Teaming up and improvisation is the key, and Snapchat is leveraging that to get the push it needs to propel forward.