Snap brings personalization, new feature set to Snap Maps

Snap saw Google Maps’s superapp potential and said, “I raise you a social layer.”

Snapchat is rolling out the My Places feature on iOS today, which introduces a trio of new tabs:

• Visited: An index of restaurants, businesses, and places a user has tagged in a Snapchat.
• Favorites: Self-explanatory.
• Popular: Using a new algorithm, Snapchat will push out personalized recommendations based on users’ locations, their friends’ tastes, and Visited/Favorites data.

On the heels of a blowout quarter, Snap is adding a recommendation engine to its mapping product, which not too long ago felt like an experimental project. My Places will also boost the discoverability of Snap Map’s 30+ million business listings, potentially unlocking new monetization opportunities for Snapchat.

• “It’s clear that Snap is leaning into location as it fights for advertising and marketing dollars with the likes of Instagram and Facebook," Ashish Prashar, CMO of R/GA, told the Brew. “They are introducing a new generation to their very own take on a location based social media network.”

Feeling lost?

Last year, Snapchat redesigned its app by adding a five-tab “action bar.” Snap Map is one of those tabs, now with “My Places” as a sub-tab and three sub-sub-tabs under that.

Redesigns can feel like rolling the dice, because there’s a risk of fatiguing users by cramming too much functionality into too small a space. But the risk/reward seems worth it for Snapchat:

1. Of the app’s 293 million daily active users in Q2, 85% were Snap Map monthly active users.
2. Snapchatters are young, savvy, and highly engaged with newer features as it is.
3. As a general rule of thumb, even the most change-averse social media users tend to have short memories.—RD