Snapchat determines friend recommendations using information you provide to the app.
This includes your contacts, existing friends and user data generated each time you interact with the app.
All of this is processed through sophisticated analytics software, resulting in a list of recommended friends. So if you want to learn more about how Snapchat determines friend recommendations, keep reading.
What are Snapchat Friend Suggestions Based on?
Before we get into all the details, it’s important to understand why Snapchat offers friend suggestions. The purpose of Snapchat is to keep you spending time on the app. The Snapchat team has been working hard to provide a large number of friends you can interact with and make on their app.
Given this, you can see that it is easily understandable why many different factors have been brought together to create friend suggestions.
Snapchat Reviews Your Contacts
Snapchat asks for permission to review your contacts when you first log in to the app. Since most people use Snapchat on a phone, many people store their contacts there.
On Snapchat, you have the option to send a friend request to anyone or everyone in your contacts. Since the app automates this, you can easily create a list of friends at the beginning. Only later can you add contacts to your phone. Or you may not immediately send a request to everyone on the phone.
Regardless of these decisions, Snapchat has permission to see your entire contacts list. So if you don’t keep sending requests, the app will only suggest people who appear in your contacts list.
List Friends of Friends
Contact details are only useful up to a certain point. The app can suggest everyone you already know, but to really increase engagement it will try to connect you with people you would like to talk to on a regular basis.
These include reconnecting with old friends and introducing people you probably already know. To do this, the app emphasizes the concept of friends of friends.
On the surface, this is quite understandable. If you and another user have a mutual friend, chances are that you already know each other.
If you have a lot of mutual friends, then you are likely to know each other. This is why Snapchat friend suggestions prioritize users who have the most friends in common with you.
While it’s true that this is a successful strategy most of the time, it may not always work. That’s why the friends of friends idea is used in combination with powerful algorithms and other friend-finding techniques.
If the rest of the algorithm thinks that you and someone else will interact a lot on the app, it will cross-reference your mutual friends. If you have such mutual friends, Snapchat will suggest you to 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 friend someone on Snapchat, you can see the mutual friends you have in common.
This feature helps you understand how certain individuals are connected to each other in your own social circle.
As an example, let’s say John added Michael as a friend on Snapchat and they have three mutual friends, Rachel, Ross and Phoebe.
This shows that there is some kind of connection between them beyond just connecting through Snapchat.
Analyzing these social connections can also help individuals understand their place in their social circles. This allows individuals to see who they consider themselves to be closely associated with and which friends may be less connected within the group.
Overall, analyzing mutual friends and social connections on Snapchat can provide valuable insights into individual relationships and overall social dynamics.
By paying attention to these features, users can better understand how they fit into their group and at the same time gain insight into the relationships of other people around them in their circles.
Taking Clues from Group Messages
The logic of this idea is quite simple. If you’re in a group chat with someone who’s not on your friends list, chances are you know them.
Snapchat wants to recommend people you like, so why not start with people who talk to you? While the app often recommends people in group messages, the idea is not at such a superficial level. The common group messages could follow a similar algorithm to the friends of friends algorithm.
When the app runs out of suggestions from group chats, it can look for people who are in more than one friend’s group chat. This creates a complete network of potential friends who could interact with you on a regular basis.
It is then combined with a similar algorithmic approach that compares other factors to see if such a recommendation will be successful. In this case, to make it simpler, you might get a completely different friend suggestion in one group message.
Comparing Common Interests
So far we’ve been through the easy parts. If you find it creepy when it feels like AI is reading your mind, this is where things get even creepier.
Snapchat pays attention to what you do on their site. The purpose of Snapchat (like any social media app) is to drive engagement.
If you engage with the content in the app, the opportunities to monetize the time allocated to you increase. That’s really what it all comes down to. So if you’re interested in certain types of content, Snapchat will recognize that.
Let’s say you love ice dancing. That interest leads to you watching a lot of Snapchat videos about ice dancing or featuring ice dancing, so the app recognizes that. So Snapchat will use this information to make friend recommendations. It will probably suggest someone else who is interested in ice dancing. If found, it will also use other metrics to make that person a possible friend. These are things like location data, friends of friends and all other factors.
If you and your ice dancing enthusiast friend get together and share your passion, you will use the app more. Of course, Snapchat analyzes your interests in a more sophisticated way. It doesn’t just catalog the times you watch ice dancing videos. They take into account your entire content consumption to understand what content you’re most interested in and what types of people you’re most likely to interact with.
This information is done for all users, and then based on that information, they direct users to each other. However, Snapchat is not always a good tool for meeting complete strangers online. This data is usually not used to recommend complete strangers. Instead, it is used to determine which potential friends are more recommended.
Tracking How You Interact with the Platform
While engagement with the platform follows a similar concept of interest tracking, it’s fundamentally a bit different. Instead of tagging content that catches your attention, it focuses more on what kinds of things you do most when you use the app.
For example, do you watch promotional videos all day, or do you just watch your friends’ stories?
There are many ways to use Snapchat, and for the people who run the app, how you use it is of great interest. While this information doesn’t inform friend recommendations as much as the things listed above, it does factor into the calculations.
If you’re someone who regularly uses Snapchat to talk to friends, the app will tend to suggest new friends with similar tendencies to you.
Again, the key point here is engagement. So Snapchat wants to suggest friends who will use the app in ways that you find interesting and/or compelling.
