Snapchat Adds 'Story' To World Cup Final

Showing off its collaborative, live-event-capturing powers, Snapchat hitched its “Our Story” feature to FIFA’s World Cup final on Sunday.

The messaging service’s entire community was given access to a stream of curated content created by those lucky enough to attend the big game between Argentina and Germany.

Snapchat debuted “Stories” late last year -- a feature that lets users save and share photos for up to 24 hours. Adding a collaborative component to the service, the start-up more recently unveiled “Our Story” so people at the same events can combine their own “snaps” into a single “story.”

“Our Story” made its official debut at the Electronic Daisy Festival, late last month, but the World Cup finale offered a far bigger stage for Snapchat to parade the feature. Rather than requiring that users opt-in, the “Riolive2014” experience automatically appeared at the top of users’ story feed.

For a while, vanishing pictures helped Snapchat stand out in a market dominated by giants like Facebook and Apple. Facebook, however, recently debuted Slingshot -- a standalone app for sharing photos and brief videos with friends.

Likely anticipating direct competition from Facebook, Snapchat has been pushing into other areas, such as live-event coverage and more mainstream mobile messaging services. It recently rolled out a text- and video-messaging feature named Chat, for instance, while making it easier for users to save their exchanges with friends.

As Facebook’s $19 billion WhatsApp deal made clear, mobile messaging is big business -- and increasingly key to reaching consumers.

Yet as a recent white paper from IPG Media Lab showed,the messaging space is beyond cramped. Along with Facebook Messenger -- in which the social giant continues to invest -- services Kik Messenger, WeChat, Line and Tango are all competing for user affections.

As various surveys suggest, the pool of potential users continues to grow -- and especially among young users who are spending more of their time on social apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine.

Never far behind young consumers, brands have been happy to experiment with Snapchat. Following Taco Bell’s lead, McDonald's joined the service earlier this year, while Heineken recently relied on Snapchat to connect with festival goers at Coachella.

Among brands, other early adopters include Juicy Couture, Seventeen, NPR and HBO's "Girls." 

To bolster its business side, Snapchat just poached the global director of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program, Mike Randall. Randall officially serves as vice president of business and marketing partnerships at Snapchat

The Verge was first to report on Snapchat’s World Cup experiment, on Sunday.

Snapchat did not return requests for comment by press time.

 
 
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