Blog Post by: Kali Kraft, Baer Performance Marketing Intern
With the App Store expected to hit 5 million apps by 2020, there couldn’t be a much larger variety to sift through for the “next best thing.” While it is hard to know when an app is created whether it will be a hit or a bust, here are three up and coming social apps to keep an eye out for in the future.
Viber
Viber is a social messaging app that allows for unlimited voice and video calls and group and individual text messaging to other app users.
While the company has been around longer than WhatsApp (the current leader of the market), they have had a recent boost in popularity. The app started the year with about 500 million users and has grown to over 900 million users in 2017 alone. It does not require you to register by creating a username and password, only asking you to enter your mobile phone number to create your account. While it remains behind WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in number of users, Viber has some unique features that outshine many other messaging apps:
- Richer interface
- Free to download, and offers versions for nearly all mobile operating systems
- Delivers HD voice call quality
- Secure, with end-to-end encryption of texts and calls
- Calls and messages to other Viber users are free, no matter their location.
As for age demographics, social messaging apps age groups are pretty evenly spread, with the age group of 18-29 slightly higher than the rest in usage.
To learn more or download Viber, visit www.viber.com.
Venmo
Venmo is a mobile person-to-person payment service allowing users to connect to their bank account or credit card in order to transfer funds to another account.
Venmo has been growing in popularity significantly in the past few years, having increased from $1.3 billion in person-to-person payments in the first quarter in 2015 to $9 billion in the third quarter of 2017.
The Paypal-owned app allows users to pay friends and family for rent, concert tickets, dinner, or any other reason you may owe someone money. You are able to hold the money within the app to use at a later date, or transfer the money into your bank account. The overwhelming majority of users are millennials.
There are concerns that Apple’s new feature, Apple Pay Cash, will take away from the number of app users due to its direct integration into iMessage. However, Venmo is available on a variety of mobile platforms, whereas Apple Pay Cash is only available for iPhones, and the familiarity of Venmo may provide an advantage.
Learn more about Venmo at www.venmo.com.
Musical.ly
Musica.ly is a video sharing app intended for teens to post 15-second lipsyncing videos.
Launched in 2014, the app has already gained over 200 million users and has been in the top 100 list on the App Store for the past two years straight. Musical.ly’s rapid growth was noticed and purchased in November by Chinese social media giant Toutiao for $1 billion.
Videos can be shared across the app as well as through other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. While the app started off as a lip-sync video site, it has grown since Vine was shut down to include short-form videos with a variety of purposes, similar to those previously found on Vine. The majority of users are between the ages of 13 and 21.
Learn more about Musical.ly at www.musical.ly.
Sources:
https://www.lifewire.com/viber-app-review-3426625
https://www.lifewire.com/whatsapp-vs-viber-3426376
http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/#fnref-17239-2
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-amount-of-money-sent-through-venmo-has-sextupled-since-2015-2017-12
https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2017/05/11/from-musers-to-money-inside-video-app-musical-lys-coming-of-age/#2b5eb3b66cff
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-use-musically-2016-6/#when-you-open-the-musically-app-it-defaults-to-a-feed-of-featured-videos-1
