Messenger Day – Snapchat-Like Facebook?

Facebook rolled out “Messenger Day” last week – possibly in an effort to reduce Snapchat’s influence. If you are already familiar with Instagram Stories, you will not be surprised by how quickly you can adapt to it – your photo and video can be edited with overlays/graphics, sent to your friends (or added to your “Day”, where it will sit at the top of your friends Messenger home screens), and appear for only 24 hours.

Although being judged as another duplicate of Snapchat’s functionality following Instagram stories and geo stickers, Facebook tried to add some differentiators:

More conversational

Overlays such as “wanna hang?”, “call me,” or expressions like “I’m feeling…”, rather than focusing on geo stickers or face-transforming lenses.

Similar to what you can do within News Feed, you can reply with “reactions” like News Feed, and those will, in turn, open up a chat window with the person within the Messenger.

Emphasizes the complete control over visibility by customizing whom you want to share with, and by allowing you to take down stories posted to your “day” whenever you’d want to.

Not surprisingly, Facebook again chose to prioritize market share over innovation, trying to replicate ideas that resonate. With much more active users as a bonus (over a billion monthly for Messenger vs. 158 million daily for Snapchat), similar tools will be on a larger scale and potentially with greater impact.

As Facebook’s News Feed is getting more crowded, desire for privacy grows – younger audiences may no longer be willing to post random images or thoughts, just because chances are their grandparents might see them. Instead, they would rather turn to a network that not everyone had caught onto yet, which also mirrors the fact that messaging apps have been seeing a steep rise in usage.

Whether Messenger Day will achieve the same success as Instagram Stories is still unknown, but it will be interesting to see how this feature will evolve with paid opportunities – especially given its totally different demographics and platform-specific user behaviors.