Snapchat determines friend suggestions using the information you provide to the application.
These include people in your contacts, your current friends, and user data generated every time you interact with the app.
All of this is processed through sophisticated analytics software, resulting in a list of suggested friends. Therefore, if you want to learn about how Snapchat determines friend suggestions, you can continue reading our article.
Why do Snapchat friend suggestions appear?
Snapchat creates friend suggestions by analyzing data such as mutual connections, phone book integration, and user interactions. Thanks to social algorithms, factors such as:
- Mutual friends,
- People saved in the phone book,
- Frequently interacted accounts,
- Similar interests
are evaluated. This data-driven approach helps users build a personalized network, strengthening social connections.
In other words, Snapchat offers these suggestions to improve the user experience and provide more meaningful interactions.
What are Snapchat friend suggestions based on?
Before starting to mention all the details, it is necessary to understand why Snapchat offers friend suggestions. Snapchat’s goal is to keep you spending time on the app. The Snapchat team works intensely to provide a large number of friends you can interact with and make on their apps.
Considering this situation, you can see that the reason for combining many different factors to create friend suggestions is easily understandable.
Snapchat examines your contacts
When you first log in to the app, permission is requested to review your contacts. Since most people use Snapchat on a phone, many store their contacts there.
On Snapchat, you have the option to send friend requests to any or all people in your contacts. Since the app automates this, you can easily create a friend list initially. However, you can add contacts to your phone later. Or you might not send a request to everyone on the phone immediately.
Regardless of these decisions, Snapchat has permission to see your entire contact list. Therefore, if you do not continue sending requests, the app only suggests people appearing in your contacts.
Listing friends of friends
Contact information only works up to a certain point. The app can suggest everyone you already know, but to really increase interaction, it will try to connect you with people you would want to talk to regularly.
This includes reconnecting with old friends and introducing people you likely know. To do this, the app relies on the concept of friends of friends.
Superficially, this is quite an understandable situation. If you and another user have a mutual friend, there is a possibility you already know each other.
If you have a large number of mutual friends, then the probability of knowing each other is high. Therefore, Snapchat friend suggestions prioritize users who have the most mutual friends with you.
While it is true that this is often a successful strategy, it may not always work. For this reason, the idea of friends of friends is used in conjunction with strong algorithms and other friend-finding techniques.
If the rest of the algorithm thinks you and a person will interact a lot on the app, it uses your mutual friends as a cross-reference. If you have such mutual friends, Snapchat suggests you add each other.
Analyzing mutual friends and social connections on Snapchat
One of the interesting aspects of Snapchat is the concept of mutual friends and social connections. When you add someone as a friend on Snapchat, you can see the mutual friends between you.
This feature helps you understand how specific individuals in your own social circle are connected to each other.
As an example, let’s say Hakan added Ismail as a friend on Snapchat, and they have three mutual friends: Ayşe, Fatma, and Hayriye.
This shows there is some kind of connection between them beyond just connecting through Snapchat.
Also, analyzing these social connections can help individuals understand their places in their own social circles. This allows individuals to see who they are closely related to and which friends might be less connected within the group.
In general, analyzing mutual friends and social connections on Snapchat can provide valuable information about individual relationships and general social dynamics.
By paying attention to these features, users can better understand how they fit into their own groups and also gain insight into the relationships of other people around them.
Taking hints from group messages
The logic of this idea is also quite simple. If you are in a group chat with someone who is not on your friend list, there is a high probability that you know this person.
Snapchat wants to suggest people you like, so why not start with the people talking to you? Although the app generally suggests people in group messages, the concept in question is not at such a superficial level. Mutual group messages can follow an algorithm similar to the friends of friends algorithm.
When the app runs out of suggestions from group chats, it can look at people who are in a group chat of multiple friends of yours. This creates a complete network of potential friends who could regularly interact with you.
Later, this is combined with a similar algorithmic approach that compares other factors to see if such a suggestion would be successful. In this case, to simplify the subject, you might receive a completely different friend suggestion within a group message context.
Comparing mutual interests
We got through the easy parts so far. We have reached a point where everything starts to become more complex. If you find it creepy when AI feels like it’s reading what’s going through your mind, things get even creepier here.
Snapchat pays attention to what you do on their site. Snapchat’s goal (like any social media app) is to increase engagement.
If you interact with content on the app, the opportunities to make money in the time allocated to you also increase. Actually, everything comes down to this point. So if you show interest in certain types of content, Snapchat will notice this.
Let’s say you love ice dancing. This interest causes you to watch many Snapchat videos related to or featuring ice dancing, so the app notices this. Therefore, Snapchat will use this information when making friend suggestions. It will likely suggest someone else interested in ice dancing. If found, it also utilizes other metrics for this person to be a possible friend. These are things like location data, friends of friends, and all other factors.
If you and your ice dancing enthusiast friend come together and share your passion, you will use the app more. Of course, Snapchat examines your interests in a more sophisticated way. It’s not just cataloged when you watch ice dancing videos. They consider your entire content consumption to understand what content you are most interested in and what kind of people you would interact with the most.
This data processing is done for all users, and then they direct users to each other based on this information. However, Snapchat is not always a good tool for meeting complete strangers on the internet. This data is generally not used to suggest completely stranger users. Instead, it is used to determine which potential friends are suggested more.
Tracking how you interact with platform
Interaction with the platform follows a similar concept to interest tracking, but basically, this is a bit different. Instead of tagging content that catches your attention, it focuses more on what types of things you do most while using the app.
For example, do you watch promotional videos all day? Or do you only watch your friends’ stories?
There are many ways to use Snapchat, and how you use it arouses great interest for the people running the app. Although this information does not inform friend suggestions as much as the things listed above, it is included in the calculations.
If you are someone who regularly uses Snapchat to talk to friends, the app will also tend to suggest new friends with similar tendencies to you.
To say it again, the key point here is interaction. For this reason, Snapchat wants to suggest friends who will use the app in ways you find interesting and/or persuasive.