Snapchat is rolling out some new options to help drive ongoing engagement and cater to group chats in the app. They are “Infinite Retention,” which enables users to save their chats in the app ongoing while “Group Streaks” will provide another means to gamify ongoing connection in the app.
First off, on infinite retention. Veering further away from Snap’s original, ephemeral content approach, infinite retention enables you to keep your chats in the app in perpetuity, if you choose.
Which, evidently, is something that Snapchatters have been requesting.
As explained by Snap:
“We’ve often heard from our community that Snapchatters want to save their chats forever. Infinite Retention can now be enabled for each individual conversation, and everyone receives a clear notification when the setting changes.”
Which, as noted, is another step away from Snap’s disappearing content roots, but given that some users could already do this anyway, it’s not really that big of a shift.
Last year, Snapchat began testing the option to select “Never delete” in your messaging retention options, which essentially makes Snap DMs just like every other messaging app.
Infinite retention is seemingly an expansion of this to more users, under a different name. Which, again, shifts your messages into a more traditional DM setting, where things won’t disappear at any time (unless you manually delete them).
That could dilute Snap’s key point of differentiation, but clearly, Snapchat is confident that there’s a user demand for this setting, enabling more people to keep their in-app discussions.
Maybe that’s a good thing, but I don’t know. It feels like it’s not Snapchat, though given the way in which people connect in the app, it does make sense.
Snap’s other new feature update is Group Streaks, which will see all chat participants contributing to a collective streak.
“Group Streaks will continue as long as most of the members participate, so it’s easy to keep it going. Like other Streaks, they are entirely optional, and private, and you can restore the Streak within a week of when it ended if you want to keep it going.”
So it’s an expansion of Snap Streaks to group chats as well, which could add a new sharing dynamic and help to keep people coming back to the app. And Snap says that there are many groups of people who are already operating long-running group chats who will welcome this new addition.
Both seem like fairly minor functional changes in the broader scheme, given the current state of Snap, even if non-disappearing messages is a big change within itself.
And as Snapchat seeks to find new growth opportunities and new ways to boost its appeal, you can expect it to keep trying out new engagement and interaction options.
