• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 9, 2017

Is a snap really a snap if it doesn’t disappear immediately after it’s viewed?

Snap, Inc. apparently thinks because, as of Tuesday, it’s changing the way users can experience the little multimedia messages.  

“We’ve all felt the frustration of not being able to fully enjoy a Snap,” the company notes in a new blog post. “We wanted to give you the option of allowing the recipient to enjoy your Snap as long as they’d like.”

In other words, it’s up to the sender of a snap whether to give recipients the option of viewing snaps ad infinitum.

After friends are finished viewing sent snaps, and tap to close them, they will still disappear.

Snap on Tuesday is also adding a new Loop tool for videos so users can decide if theirs snaps plays once, or loop until their friends are ready to tap to the next snap.

Additionally, the creative tools are being rearranged on the Snapchat app, making room for “Magic Eraser” tool. The new features comes as Facebook and other Snap rivals are copying its features faster than it can roll them out.

Turning the tables slightly, Snap just recently stole a page from Facebook’s playbook with the launch of a new self-service ad-buying platform.

Over the past year, Snapchat has secured its spot as a top app. According to comScore, the popular service officially joined the ranks of the Top 10 most popular apps in late 2016.

“Snapchat … went from being a very popular app among the younger demographics to being one of the most popular apps among the general population,” Adam Lella, senior analyst at comScore, recently told MediaPost's Social Media & Marketing Daily.

Critically, Snapchat’s general popularity has yet to undercut its status among Millennials, according to comScore’s 2017 Cross-Platform Future in Focus report.

At the end of 2016, a whopping 78% of U.S. consumers ages 18-to-24 -- and 48% of those 25-to-34 -- were using Snapchat By Snap’s own estimate, 41% of U.S. adults ages 18-to-34 check out Snapchat every day.

Worldwide, Snapchat Discover has now surpassed 150 million daily active users.