How To Become Best Friends On Snapchat
Snapchat is a great way to connect with friends and family, but it can be hard to find people you’d like to stay in touch with. If you have someone in mind, here’s how to become best friends on Snapchat.
- Send a Snap
The first step is sending a Snap that shows how much you care about this potential friend. Don’t send anything too personal or embarrassing—just something nice! If they don’t respond right away, don’t fret. They may not have seen it yet, or they might be too busy to respond right away.
- Send another Snap!
If they don’t respond again after that, try sending another Snap! You might want to wait a little bit between messages so you don’t seem like an annoying pest who won’t leave them alone, but if they keep ignoring your messages and never responding back, then maybe it wasn’t meant to be after all!
- Make sure both of you have the same phone number saved as your “My Friends” contacts list on Snapchat so that when either one of you adds each other as friends on the app by clicking their username in their bio section (or searching for each other).
How To Become Best Friends On Snapchat
Since Snapchat is quickly becoming the social media app to rule all apps, there are a few things we should learn to better use it. Filters, hacks, tips and even tricks are all swirling around in one giant mess. But one important question still goes unanswered: how does Snapchat choose your “best friends”? Is it an algorithm, luck of the draw, or just random chance?
If you are wondering what on earth I am talking about then you should open your app. Take a photo, add some text and filter the crap out of it. Now that you are ready to send, click the blue arrow at the bottom right of the screen. You will be taken to a page where all of your contacts are. You can send it to your story so that everyone can see your work, or you can look a little lower to the exclusive category called “best friends”. Depending on your social media activity, you might have a lot of names in that category or a few. But how do you get people on this list? Is there a secret Snapchat bouncer I have to lie to in order to get a shot? It’s actually a lot less complicated then you would imagine.
Snapchat monitors and keeps track of who you are constantly sending pictures to. According to their support page, the best friend category changes everyday depending on who you interact most with. This makes perfect sense because if you keep sending your photos to one person, typing out their username or scrolling through your entire contact list can be a bore. This way you have their name right under your fingertips — super convenient.
It was always weird that Snapchat exposed who you snapped with most in the “Best Friends” list, so today the app is ditching that for a new private way to see who you’re closest to. Only you will see these new Friend Emojis on your screen of incoming snaps.
Here’s what Snapchat’s Friend Emojis mean:
Previously, you or anyone with you in their contacts could go to your Snapchat profile and see who you sent snaps to most, and there was no way to turn this off. This might have made people question their friendship with someone if they didn’t appear in their Best Friends list, and may have outted romantic partners who were SnapCheating — sending snaps to another crush.
Rather than blog about, Snapchat actually hid the brief instruction manual for Friend Emojis in the Snap Channel of its app’s Discover section.
For a video demo of how Friend Emojis work, plus funny coverage of tech and Silicon Valley life, follow me on Snapchat at “JoshConstine” or by focusing your Snapchat camera on my QR Snaptag over here.
Low-Light Camera And “Needs Love”
There are also two more new features. A “Moon” icon at the top of the camera lets you turn on and off a low-light mode for the camera. Previously, Snapchat’s camera was terrible in low light compared to most phones’ default cameras. Now when you’re in the dark, the moon icon will appear, and you can tap it to instantly brighten what you’re looking at, making Snapchat better at night, parties, and concerts.
Snapchat also wants to remind you to send snaps to people you haven’t in a while. When you go to pick friends to send a Snap to, under your list of “Recents” who you’ve snapped with a lot recently, you’ll see a section of “Needs Love”, who are people you used to snap with a lot but haven’t sent one to in a while.
Friend Emojis and “Needs Love” both turn Snapchat into more of a game. These features could make people want to snap more so they get a Snapstreak or become someone’s best friend, and guilt them about not snapping with certain people anymore.
If these, or other Snapchat features seem confusing, that’s sort of the point. The company hopes it users will teach each other how the features work, and that questions about them on social media will make the app more viral. Sneaky. Smart.
