As the social mapping wars heat up, Snap has announced a milestone in its competitive play, Snap Map. The feature has surpassed 400 million monthly active users, which is a decent portion of Snap’s overall user base of 900 million monthly actives. This also makes it the most engaged social map.
Before going into those competitive dynamics in the social mapping space, what is Snap Map? The Snapchat feature has oscillated over the past decade, but is Snapchat’s designated space for local discovery. That includes finding places, as well as finding your friends, in physical proximity.
Recent feature updates include “Footsteps,” which lets users create, track, and share a sort of travel log of their physical-world movement patterns. This can be a fun way to crunch numbers on the distance you’ve travelled, the farthest place from home that you’ve visited, and other “quantified self” metrics.
And the core functionality hasn’t gone away, which is to get at-a-glance positioning of close friends, which can inspire impromptu plans to meet up. This use case has monetization potential because Snap Map can steer users towards local spots in ways that drive demand for promotional placement.
The latter takes form in Snap’s “Promoted Places” offering for local businesses. This lets multi-location brands and SMBs showcase their locations on Snap Map. The UX shows such businesses prominently when a user is within proximity, or views the locations of friends that are nearby a business.
Social Layer
Back to the broader mapping wars, we’ve seen several competitors inspired by Snap Map, such as Instagram. The thought is that, though Google Maps has a dominant presence in mapping, it’s missing a social layer to provide navigation and place discovery in the context of social signals and activity.
In fact, this social layer is the biggest thing that Google hasn’t been able to replicate, despite several tries over the years (Google Wave, Google+, etc.). So Snap Map was born to fill that void. And others have followed, as noted, such as Instagram’s “Friend Map.” It similarly plots social graphs spatially.
Another way to think about Instagram’s play is that it takes its broader discovery-engine ethos for style/food/fashion and adds an additional relevance trigger: location. For example, like Snap Map, it offers users the opt-in ability to share their location and see their friends’ real-time location on a map.
The question is if these social mapping entrants can battle the incumbents. Though Google and Apple have established market shares and technological head starts, they lack social graphs for an additional mapping dimension. Snap and Instagram clearly recognize this competitive edge and are leaning into it.
But the thing we’ve learned historically is that map bells & whistles mean nothing without the basics. Mapping apps have to find what you’re looking for, which requires accurate business listings. And monetization requires ad sales infrastructure, which Snap and Meta have. We’ll see if they can pull it off.
Header image credit: Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash
