Snapchat Announces Group Chat

The more the merrier this festive season! Snapchat just announced the rollout of its own Group Chat functionality in its app.

So what’s new?

Now after snapping your favorite view of the Rockies or a glimpse of your holiday eggnog, you’ll be able to send the image or video to a group chat. Users will be able to add up to 16 friends to a chat – unlucky for the 17th 🙂

When friends pop into a chat, their names will display in a designated color. Sometimes you’re orange. Sometimes you’re pink. Enjoy the variety! When a user pops out of a chat, their name turns gray.

Group chats are deleted after 24 hours much like one on one chats – meaning your collective ramblings are only viewable for a finite amount of time.

But wait! There’s more…

Within group chats, if you feel the urge to break away and strike up a conversation with someone in the group, all you need to do is tap their name and a private chat will open.

Easter egg or empowering UX?

Hold down on messages to either copy text or save text in chat – much like pinning something.

The road ahead for advertising in the platform

It is still unclear if Snapchat will ever integrate ads into the chat formats – but one can’t help but think about the associated possibilities. Imagine advertisers are afforded the opportunity to align themselves with certain words in group chats for example and win the right to serve ads based on particular categories such as retail, travel or FMCG. There is also the possibility to serve ads based on location as well in chats but we’ll leave that out there for now.

In the meantime, we have group chats to start together!

Remember you need to update to have the group chat functionality. iOS update to be found here.

Happy snapping!