A not-so-good Q4 earnings report, which sent shares in the company tumbling yesterday, later today Snap's good news with now its monthly active user count up to 800 million, up from the 750 million MAU that it reported in February last year.

Well, it's good on a number of levels in terms of the numbers, but there's also much that can be said about exactly how Snap is growing. But let's get into all that.

Snap
"We are proud to announce that Snapchat has finally reached 800 million monthly active users! Snapchat was built from scratch as an alternative social network, which served as the perfect means for our community to reach out to its friends and family, to share ideas, to have fun moments together.". We have used all our time so far trying to do the right thing for our community and staying true to the values that define us: Continuing to concentrate on helping Snapchatters connect with their friends and family rather than building vast networks of people they don't know. And those connections have been shown to make people happier: Snapchatters report a higher level of satisfaction with the quality of friendships and relationships with family than non-Snapchatters, and over 90% of Snapchatters say they feel comfortable, happy, and connected when using our service.

Snap is touting this "antidote to social media" line in a new ad campaign where it is trying to distance itself from other social apps. And with broader online sharing trends drifting toward more private messaging, Snap seems placed well to benefit from the emerging opportunities, though its real growth hasn't been as healthy as Snap would have liked.

Because whereas Snapchat added 50 million more users in the last 12 months, nearly all that growth came from outside of Snapchat's core revenue markets, North America and the EU.
Snap says it has concentrated on growth in that latter category to maximize future opportunity. The rub is that developing markets like India take in greatly less revenue for the company because there are fewer advertisers, as well as generally lower overall in-app spend.

So while this has made Snap's growth charts look better, Snap explained in its earnings call yesterday that it's now going to shift focus to Europe and North America.

"Although we do see huge long-term prospects for community growth in Rest of World, we are focusing more of our attention on community growth in our more mature geographies like North America and Europe.". Over the past couple of years we have been able to drive strong DAU growth by focusing on Android performance in large emerging markets-most notably India. We will continue building on our momentum in the APAC region while increasing our investment in improving the product experience for our community in North America and Europe.

So, while it's obviously positive news that Snap is adding more users, Snap itself admits that the audience growth is a little misleading in terms of driving its overall business success.
And really, overall numbers such as these are just indicators of opportunity, it is up to the business then to capitalize on such, and translate that into broader success. For individual brands, the importance of the audience growth is that it may indicate that your target market is active in the app, but that comes down to your own analytics and research, and understanding where, exactly, your specific marketing focus should be.

Essentially, Snap adding 50 million more users in a year is positive in terms of wider trends, but not so much in relation to immediate benefit. And given Snap's changed focus, that growth could slow in the next year as it looks to maximize its income potential.