As if being able to follow every move of your friends, celebrities and favorite TV personalities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram wasn’t enough, two new social apps are taking it to a new level. Meerkat and Periscope are both new live streaming applications for your smart phone that connect through Twitter to broadcast video instantly to followers.
Meerkat, the first of the two to be released, was a hit at SXSW (or “SouthBy,” for those in the know) – and immediately claimed a bunch of big name users such as Jimmy Fallon, Madonna and Steve-O. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meerkat had over 120,000 users within the first 3 weeks of its release and was seeing growth of about 30% a day.
Then, just a couple weeks after it seemed Meerkat was claiming this space all to itself, Periscope popped its head up. Owned by Twitter, which gives it some instant credibility, Periscope already has people buzzing just days after its release. What does Periscope have that Meerkat doesn’t? The ability to play previously recorded streams, a cleaner interface and, reportedly, an impressively small 2-second lag time.
Social media and brand marketing teams will surely soon be looking for a way to use leverage new apps to reach their audience more effectively. I’m interested to see what they come up with and whether companies will gain measurable results from it.
As these apps continue to pick up traction, one will likely end up dominating – much like VHS and Beta. (Hey, those were once cutting-edge technologies.) Really, who is going to use both – that would be time- (and data-) consuming. Each social media network needs to stake out a unique territory to be successful.
So who will win? Is Meerkat or Periscope better? Which should we choose? But maybe real question here isn’t which app we’re going to choose, but why would we possibly need either of them? Who are we going to watch that has a life so interesting that we need to watch it live? Plus, if their life is that interesting, they probably don’t have time to be “Meerkat-ing” it.
~ Sarah Yeager, Account Coordinator, The S3 Agency
