Let’s Investigate Peach, That Juicy New Social Platform

What’s Peach?

That’s more than a kinda-cutesy blog lede. It’s a real-life question that some of us ‘Blasters have been asking one another around HQ lately. We should consider it. Peach has been making all sorts of tech-news headlines since its January release, rocketing to the top of the Apple App Store’s Top Free chart, before disappearing, then reappearing once more.

But while users and brands alike are still determining just where Peach fits in their lives and whether or not it can establish itself as a singularly powerful platform, let’s break down what we do know.

Peach is a mobile-only social network.
Still in its infancy, Peach is settling into that make-or-break survival period in which many new apps, startups and social platforms gestate before its fate is determined by popular opinion, kind of like in the Roman Colosseum.
It’s mad cute. (This one is actually pretty important.)

I’ve been playing around with Peach for the past few weeks, evaluating its potential as a valuable and unique tool and determining whether there’s room for another platform inside the Internet. Let’s talk about it, FAQ style, baby.

Assemble your squad, says Peach.

So what is Peach’s deal?

Peach should be familiar to anyone who has been on the Internet in the past six years. Actions and behaviors like adding friends, posting status updates and uploading photos and videos are Peach’s bread and butter, of course.

Gotcha. You mean just like every other social network I’m on?

Yes and no. Peach isn’t reinventing the wheel by any means, simply augmenting it to become a wholly new experience (in theory). With its “magic words,” Peach users are given a significantly larger content creation sandbox, where access to drawing (think Snapchat), Shazam-like song discovery, simplified GIF creation/ retrieval and more equip Peach with a feelings-based, creativity-first identity. Marrying pieces of already successful social networks and repackaging it all as a new experience is the idea here.

You can’t tell, but this is a GIF on Peach and it looks really cool.

An example, if you will: Rather than upload an image of my hot date last night, I can create a four-panel GIF of my wine glass, dining partner, the restaurant’s ambient atmosphere and my spoon scooping some sweet dessert. Or draw a cute little picture to accompany it. Or add a romantic song. Peach is enabling users to think critically and creatively about what we do on it and how we share ourselves with one another.

ChatterBlasters Jackie and Kyle are digging Peach.

Sounds cool. So how intuitive is Peach?

Right now, fairly. After creating an account, a short tutorial walks users through the magic word system, how to add friends, what kind of fun stuff you can create, all that jazz. From a design standpoint, the Peach aesthetic is one that smoothly incorporates emojis and related soft visual vernacular into its user experience. For instance, you don’t “add friends”; you assemble your squad. (Cue: twins emoji.) On the flipside, its user experience will only improve as developers smooth over the rough edges in future updates.

But I’m in marketing. Is Peach a network I can potentially leverage for my brand or business?

Great question. The possibilities for Peach are still pretty undetermined, but big names have already begun experimenting. My favorite example so far is Merriam-Webster’s Peach usage. The dictionary brand admittedly finds visual storytelling a challenge on social, but with Peach’s sketch tool married with a “Word of the Day” content series, they have already built a following of over 2,000. For a nearly month-old platform, that’s pretty damn good.

Nicely done, Merriam-Webster.

And that’s the thing. Because Peach’s toolset is so new and untested, we’re seeing this as the big experiment phase of the app’s growth. Ideally, as its user base grows, we’ll start seeing talented Peachers (can’t believe I just typed that) finding inventive solutions to digital storytelling.

I learned a lot. This is a wonderful blog. Anything else?

I think there’s a lot of potential here. Peach appears to have tapped into the more esoteric nature of social media by sifting past our left-brained, information-first tendencies and speaking to our emotions. Everything about Peach—the way the platform is packaged, its emoji-based evolution of the Facebook poke, its heavy emphasis on intuition—suggests that social media is a tool that speaks fluently to our feelings. Now it’s time to learn how to use this new tool.