Snapchat wants to make it easier for people to find restaurants, stores, parks and other interesting places in their neighborhood, so it is starting to implement the My Places feature on its Snap Map, which connects users with more than 30 million businesses. Users can register their favorite places, send them to friends and find recommendations.
My Places has three main tabs: visited, favorites and popular. Visited lists the places that were registered on Snapchat and favorites, the favorite places. But the popular tab is particularly interesting because it marks the first time Snapchat has used an algorithm to provide personalized recommendations to help people interact with the world around them. The algorithm considers where you are, what you tagged or bookmarked, and what your friends’ and other Snapchatters’ visits were.
This further differentiates the socially-advanced Snap Map from more established resources like Google Maps and Apple Maps, which you can’t really use to find out which restaurants your friends like. Sure, Snapchat can’t give you directions to that trendy sushi bar, but just like Google Maps it’s not intended to show you what bar everyone went to the night before.
Snapchat shared survey results indicating that, on average, its users are more likely to engage in “post-pandemic” activities, adding that 44% of Snapchatters turn to Snap’s map to find places around them that they’re interested in.
With more than 250 million monthly active users on Snap Map, the company announced an update in May called Layers, which allows partner businesses to add data directly to their own map. So far, Snapchat collaborated with Ticketmaster and The Infatuation, a restaurant recommendation website; these partnerships help users see where they can find live entertainment or which great restaurants are hiding in plain sight. Snapchat plans to integrate even more layers into Snap Map and My Places later this year.
A few days ago, Snap announced that during the second quarter of this year, it grew both revenue and daily active users at the highest rates it achieved in the last four years. Year over year, the app grew 23%.