Nir Eyal has developed the ‘hook’ model: how to hook customers through trigger; action; reward which creates their investment in your brand…

I was reading a slideshare by him yesterday that explored how Snapchat fits the ‘hook’ model. It’s really good. You can read it here

What stuck with me was his idea that successful social media often comes with constraints. For example, twitter has a certain number of characters to limit what you can say. Snapchat’s constraint is that once you send that snap it’s gone.

‘Now you see it, now you don’t’ is a rule with a benefit because it allows you to be spontaneous, to broadcast your thought and get away with it (theoretically).

It fits into the ‘hook’ model because the ‘live’ nature of Snapchat requires the ‘receiver’ to react straight away to the snap: so you have a trigger, a re-action and the response creates a reward which gets you invested in using the app more.

Note to self: we need to learn from Snapchat in developing mobile moment-capture apps in market research. If we can create the trigger for people to record the small bits of their life, and if we can create a reward for them doing it… then we’re on to a winner.