Opinion

What is Peach? And should my brand be on it?

GeorgePappasIn this guest post George Pappas explains what the recently launched social media platform Peach is and looks at what it might do for brands. 

Every now and then we hear of the latest social media outlet climbing the download charts and perhaps threatening the very existence of the big five social networks.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been hearing more and more about the cutely-named Peach – a social app some are calling the lovechild of Facebook and Tumblr. Ultimately, it’s a blog without all the effort.

peach promptsWhat makes Peach unique is the existence of ‘magic words’ – keywords that act as text commands to help youshare information with your network quicker.

Prompts like “song”, which shares what music you’re listening to through the phone’s microphone, “weather” which shares the current temperature with a relevant emoji, “rate” which allows you to add a star-rating to what you’re about to share and “draw” which brings up a pad for you to draw on. I’m sure you get the picture.

Peach’s ultimate premise is to keep you up to date with what your friends are doing, and equipping users to share such information with greater ease (and in some ways, greater enjoyment) currently offered by the big social networks.

Technically, this is becoming known as contextual data in social.

We are seeing its emergence through platforms such as Snapchat who use filters specific to a certain context.

The question we’re all asking though is whether or not Peach will be a true player in the social matrix or dwindle away into nonexistence like hundreds of other outlets before it. Command-prompts together with contextual data is a good match, and ultimately nothing new. But Peach has packaged it together in a cute, user friendly app that have many people calling it the biggest news story in social for years.

So, what are the opportunities on Peach for brands? Globally, some major brands like Asos and The Washington Post are live on Peach and, from what it seems, are merely experimenting at this early stage. Like when any new network becomes increasingly popular, brands are going to find it difficultto resource the inclusion of new platforms and will instead dabble and equip existing resource to give it a try.

Ultimately, we must differentiate between the good, the bad and the fads. It’s unlikely our local market will adopt Peach as a core social platform – at least for some time.

peach logoGoing off global trends, though, Peach can be a great way to build and interact with your community and even works as a distribution channel (some brands are seeing traffic spikes to their website when posting links on Peach). If it does become a hit locally, brands can utilise the platform to personify and humanise their voice… more so than allowed on Facebook and the like where companies are distinctively separate.

Overall, I’m reluctant to proclaim Peach as the next big thing for brands as some commentators are doing.

What I can tell you with certainty, though, is that Peach is on trend. It supports native multimedia content, relies on emojis and makes content sharing more efficient. As consumers of online and social content, we’re becoming lazier and less reliant on manual information-finding and more reliant on a social network’s ability to allow us to share information efficiently, and serving us information that we’re willing to consume without us even having to look for it.

To that degree, we’ll continue to see a general emergence toward type-prompts and contextual data like we see in Peach (you can even order an Uber using Peach), but whether or not Peach will survive is largely dependent on the bigger players (such as Facebook) and how quickly they’ll adapt to the shifting social behaviour of users generally.

George Pappas is campaign director at digital agency G Squared

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