750 million users engage with Snapchat on a monthly basis, as stated in Snapchat’s latest announcement

Snapchat, the popular social media app, recently shared some exciting news about its business during its Investor Day event. In particular, the company announced that it now boasts over 750 million monthly active users. While this figure is a far cry from Facebook’s impressive 2.96 billion monthly active users, it does put Snapchat ahead of some of its competitors, including Pinterest, which recently reported having 450 million monthly users.

Despite this growth, it remains unclear how Snapchat stacks up against Twitter. Twitter is no longer publicly traded following its acquisition by Elon Musk, and its publicly reported metrics prior to the acquisition used a different metric than Snapchat’s. Twitter used its own metric called mDAUs, or monetizable monthly active users, which was designed to measure the number of users who would actually see its ads. The last publicly reported number for Twitter’s mDAUs was 237.8 million in July 2022, which is smaller than Snapchat’s 375 million daily users.

During an event in 2021, Snap shared that it has 750 million monthly active users, with 150 million of those in North America. The company believes it can reach over 1 billion users in the next two to three years. Meanwhile, TikTok announced that it has already reached 1 billion monthly active users and is projected to hit 1.8 billion by the end of 2022.

Snap also used the event to introduce new product offerings, including its 3D Snap Map and a feature called Communities. The latter is designed for private groups where members can add friends and post to a shared Campus Story. Currently, the feature is available for colleges and high schools, but it will expand to more communities over time. According to Snap, over 1,400 colleges in the U.S. currently have access to Communities.

Snapchat+ is another area where the company has seen success. The paid subscription service, which costs $3.99/month, now has 2.5 million subscribers, which is a more precise number than the 2+ million previously announced during earnings.

Investors are interested in how Snap is managing the competitive landscape, particularly with regard to the threat posed by TikTok. They are also looking for insight into how Snap’s investments in its ads business will drive growth and whether the company can offer guidance about the future. More information on these topics may be forthcoming later in the day.

Snap, the social media giant, has announced that it will focus primarily on direct response (DR) advertising in the coming years. This segment currently makes up around two-thirds of Snap’s business and is growing at a faster rate than its brand-oriented advertising. In the last five years, the DR platform has been the primary driver of the company’s ad revenue, with a compound annual growth rate of over 50%.

The company has made significant investments in various adtech and formats, including both traditional and newer technologies like augmented reality (AR). Snap has also expressed its commitment to enhancing the quality of engagement and conversions, while addressing the increased cost-per-action that resulted from its recent changes.

Snap plans to increase the volume of measurable conversions through improved relevance targeting and machine learning optimizations. This move is part of the company’s efforts to provide better returns on advertising spend to its clients.

Snap also shared information about its TikTok competitor, Spotlight. While the feature has garnered engagement from 300 million monthly active users, it represents less than half of Snap’s total monthly active users. However, the company noted that engagement for Spotlight was still growing. In the fourth quarter, the total time spent watching Spotlight more than doubled from the previous year, and the number of submissions to Spotlight was up by nearly 20% over the same time frame.

Overall, Snap’s focus on DR advertising and continued investment in adtech and engagement-enhancing technologies indicate that the company is committed to delivering measurable results for its clients while continuing to innovate and evolve its platform.

Snapchat has experienced significant growth outside North America and Europe, with its community expanding by more than 80% since Q4 2020. In addition, the platform has seen a YoY increase of 95% in daily new users who have three or more friends. This is an impressive feat, given the stiff competition in the social media space.

One of the reasons why Snapchat has been successful in retaining its users is that those who talk to at least three friends over the course of a month tend to stick around, with retention rates exceeding 90% on average. On any given day, Snapchat users share memories with their friends around 280 million times.

Snapchat has also demonstrated strong long-term retention, with annualized retention rates averaging around 90% for the five years after a user’s first year on the platform. In the US, Snapchat is opened nearly 40 times per day on average, and over 60% of users who open the app each day create Snaps. In total, over 5 billion Snaps are created every day.

Another interesting finding is that 88% of users who Snap or chat with a friend will continue to use the app every day for the next seven days. Snapchat’s map is used by over 300 million users per month, with daily map users opening the map an average of six times per day.

In Q4, Snapchat’s Spotlight feature saw a significant increase in total time spent watching, more than doubling from the previous year. In addition, Spotlight submissions rose by nearly 20% during the same period. Two out of three users engage with augmented reality (AR) on a daily basis, and over 70% of users who download the app engage with AR during their first day.

The number of users with at least one friend Story to view has also increased by 15% YoY. Furthermore, US time spent per view for both creator Stories and Spotlight grew by “large” double-digit percentages in Q4 compared with the previous year. The number of Snapchatters subscribing to new creators via Spotlight increased by 225%, and the total number of daily subscriptions rose by 240%.

In India, time spent on Spotlight increased by more than three times, while time spent watching shows increased by over 55% in 2022. Snapchat’s media partners include some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, including NBCU, Disney/ESPN, Channel 4, MBC, and sports leagues like the NFL and NBA. Digital natives like Team Whistle and Jellysmack, as well as news brands such as The Washington Post, Axios, and Axel Springer, are also part of the platform’s media partner ecosystem.

Spotlight reaches over 300 million users per month, while more than 250 million users have engaged with AR shopping Lenses over 5 billion times since 2021. Finally, Snap’s AR creator community, which comprises over 300,000 creators and developers, has built over 3 million Lenses, indicating the platform’s growing AR capabilities.