What’s the Deal with Snapchat Memories?

Snapchat just announced Memories, “a new way to save Snaps and stories on Snapchat”. In reality, though, Snapchat Memories is much more than a new way to save Snaps – it’s a notable change in identity for the platform itself.

Snapchat has always been about sharing what is happening now, in the moment, with your following. With Snapchat Memories, Snapchat has introduced a way to share moments from not just the past 24 hours, but from any moment you’ve captured with your phone. This is a huge change that hasn’t been highlighted in their recent announcement.

How Does It Work?

Like most of Snapchat’s new features, using Memories takes some time to figure out – but it’s a pretty great feature once you get the hang of it. Essentially, you can now upload photos from your phone and add text, emoji, and drawings to them just like you would with any regular snap. You can then choose to send these Memories to friends, or add them directly to your story. If the dimensions of your photo are wider than the standard square format, they’ll be positioned horizontally, so keep this in mind when uploading photos. Photos that are more than 24 hours old will be accompanied with both a time stamp, and a white background to let your followers know that they are Memories, not regular snaps.

You can also now post longer snaps, via a small workaround built into Memories. If you have a video clip saved to your phone that’s over 10 seconds, Snapchat will now just roll that video into multiple snaps. This gives users more freedom to share, so watch for longer clips coming to your friends’ Snapchat stories.

So, What’s the Deal?

For avid snappers, this means that you are no longer limited to adding images to your story that have been taken in Snapchat. You can now upload any image you want, giving you more freedom to introduce products, offerings, and calls to action into your snaps.

It also means that users can now save and archives their snaps for later viewing/use. If you’re taking a trip, for example, you can now save all of the snaps from your trip and include them in a single memory to watch later. It’s a fun way to create collections based around a single theme.

What seems to be clear is that Snapchat is shifting it’s business strategy. The platform has always focused on short, ephemeral content – something that Memories is a direct pivot from. With the ability to post longer content that wasn’t originally captured within the app, and the option to save content once posted for future use in Memories, the app is giving way to a new era.

Advertisers are pressuring Snapchat for more ways to promote their content, and it appears as though that pressure is resulting in features that run counter to the brand’s identity. Will this actually bring them a viable ad revenue stream?  That remains to be seen. What seems certain is that this feature marks a noticeable shift in their core formula. Snapchat grew to where it is from the core temporal nature of their channel. Knowing the picture would exist for only 10 seconds is a large part of what made the channel so appealing to begin with. It’s almost akin to if Instagram started including text posts.

Can Snapchat Memories work with a following accustomed to impermanence? Leave your thoughts in a comment below.