As the incumbent social networks grow ever more complex, vying to compete for weekly active use and engagement metrics, they leave behind their original driving use cases. The most successful have been simple: Facebook was ‘who am I? What my friends are doing?’. Instagram was ‘images I take, images I like’. Snapchat, ‘where I am and what I am up to’, and Twitter ‘what is happening, and what I think about it?’.
While Twitter and Snapchat have maintained their original core propositions, Facebook and Instagram have been steadily growing their portfolio of uses – resulting in stratified engagement and becoming increasingly lean back in consumption.
Enter Beer Buddy. Number 25 on the US App Store in Social Networking, with a 4.8 rating from over 46.7K ratings on the Apple App Store alone, it stands as one of a number of related, equally simplistic apps. The premise is incredibly basic: a user downloads, adds friends, and, when they are having a beer (or other drink), they simply tap a button and a message of what they are drinking and where is sent out to all of their friends on the app.
That is it – that is the whole pitch. It sticks to the core dual premise base of all successful social apps: ‘what I am drinking, and where’. It functions as an enabling tool for IRL socialisation, replicating the age-old casual meet at a common local spot – a social behaviour that has been lost in the complex plethora of digital social navigation.
As an adjacent app to a service-industry-based social function, the logical assumption would be that lockdowns would have sunk the app as much as they have sunk the pub. However, the appeal of a casual ‘having a beer’, with simple message reply options of ‘cheers’ and ‘can I join?’, has lent itself to lockdown surprisingly well; the app continues to update regularly, and maintains its ranking on app stores.
As the psychological toll of repetitive lockdown catchups, with little new to say, makes it ever harder for apps, like Instagram, to really shine, Beer Buddy allows for a simple digital ‘cheers’ between friends anywhere in the world; a low-stress, entirely positive exchange.
Linked to Snapchat, it clearly has no ambition to truly compete with the other larger social networks. However, it does make the case for simplicity – and a renewed metric of success. Rather than competing for engagement, trying to trick users into spending ever more time on it, it simply looks for downloads amongst community users who want to catch up with their friends in a casual way, and to make their experience using it a positive one. In this, it has succeeded.
As social apps hit peak competition in the attention crunch post-pandemic, the likelihood that more engaged disruptors will break the market hold of stagnating incumbent apps grows. While it is possible that a new majority dynamic will take its place, Beer Buddy offers a vision of a different future, one more befitting the parallel trends in the music and gaming industries: a more fragmented marketplace, with single-purpose applications and networks that do their jobs very well, all sharing a smaller piece of users’ attention time. Aggregation makes sense when the associated network also serves as a portal to content; when that portal is primarily a phone screen, click-through to a Facebook tertiary feature (for example) has more user friction than a home-screen, single-purpose selection. As lean in becomes more enticing than lean back, and consumers are, once more, able to go out and socialise in the real world, facilitative apps, like Beer Buddy, will come into their element – and the incumbents will face a market where they are not only competing with fast-innovating new disruptors, but newly-scarce IRL activities as well.