What did Mark Zuckerberg just do??

The WhatsApp users who do not have auto update on for android app were up for a shocking surprise on Friday, Feb 24, 2017 morning. Let’s talk about android phones for a moment here. WhatsApp (WA) team did the most legit sneakiest thing a tech company can do, they did a delta update, which updated the app even without one’s explicitly auto/manual updating the app. Mark Zuckerberg was on a hunt! “If I can’t buy it (Snapchat) declare a Tech World War and kill it!”

All those (read: all of us) woke up and at a first gotten chance on Friday morning, tapped on our smart screen, we all got shaken up in a horror, “where’s my status????”. Finding a new introduction of status menu, we tried, we explored it, we experimented, we figured out, and we became experts already! WA status update created buzz on many WA groups which has high number of techies and developers, it already became an instant sensation in a few hours of introduction!! WA status is suddenly the coolest thing among the 1.6 billion WA userbase!

By copying Snapchat’s stories for WA status, what did Zuck do?
WA status was everyone’s personal corner for expression, self expression, which was not really out there, but was out there if you check someone’s profile, or if you are stalking someone!  People were hooked to the WA status. More people checked others’ WA statuses then we believe.

Was it really copying stories? Zucky baby did more than that, he instilled a new habit in us, replacing old one. People were a li’l upset temporarily with not finding status messages that stayed for days. The initial frustration wore off very quickly when I could create video+photo+text status which also displays me how many viewed my status, this was a carrot Zucky showed to us. The only condition for using this was, you have to update this every day! The super smart people at WA want you to change your status everyday now, you already want your status, self expression, revealed to the world, now, you can’t save it forever or until you change it! You have to have a new status everyday! You can have video/photo/text ! WA is perceived as 1.7 billion active user’s favorite and the most prevalent messaging app, used umpteen times a day.

The resistance to using stories status will be less because, we already are habituated with status updates. All WA did is introduced a li’l tweak, same status, more jazzy, on a highly reputed app than the sneaky secret and notoriously known for sexting/naked photo exchanging app snapchat, add that to the more frequent (read: daily) status update stories. I already have heard people saying, I will have to prepare for my statuses in advance now, and keep changing it everyday! WA users will not give up on status updates, period! There lies WA’s stories’ success. Stories are more engaging, with inherent photo/video messages than long textual messages on WA, which so many of us tap on “clear chat” without even glancing at it. WA has created a parallel deeply engaging feature in a sense- now, we have got a new mental itch to update our status everyday, and to check how many views we have got every time we open WA, and a curiosity to check what statuses other people (read: people whom we stalk) have,and also send them replies on their statuses! Very very smart calculated strategy at a right place by Zucky baby, Hats off to him!!

Would WhatsApp Stories be successful??
WhatsApp Stories won’t be successful, it’ll be SUPER SUPER successful.

Would this impact Snapchat IPO in this week?
Snapchat’s one month user engagement matrix will be infinitesimal compared to WA’s one day user engagement matrix in a very short period of time. When you have a competitor with billions of impressions multiple times a day, who would invest in a few hundred million impressions, that too receding day by day??

Will this kill Snapchat?
It definitely will bring down the Snapchat traffic. The teens and a fraction of  millennials, which almost make up the Snapchat’s audience, also use WA to communicate with their closed and dear ones. If I’m one of those Snapchat users, I have more people on WA with whom I communicate with than on Snapchat, I will prefer to get higher views on my same status (story), that would be on WA, which becomes my key motivation to update WA status story to show off to a larger group of people than on snapchat story. And I need to update my status upon which I am already hooked to.

Zucky just had a big kill, and will feast on this for years to come now!
I can already see him having a last laugh at Snapchat for rejecting his 3 billion buyout offer a few years back, he is on the verge of making Snapchat almost worthless in a few months from now 🙂

(Image source: self, google)