​Meerkat: The Lowdown

Meerkat (noun): a small southern African mongoose. Or in the marketing world – a live-streaming app that’s causing a bit of a stir.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this March then you’ve probably heard “Meerkat” being bandied around, but, like me, you might not be 100% sure what it is.

So without further ado, here’s the lowdown on what you need to know about Meerkat…

What Is Meerkat?

Meerkat is an iPhone and iPad app which allows users to broadcast live video streams to their Twitter followers.

How Does It Work?

Meerkat allows for instant connection; once your stream has begun, an alert and link is automatically sent to your followers.

Who’s Using It?

The app only launched three weeks ago (early March 2015) but already it’s passed 100,000 users. And pretty much everybody has been using it, from celebrities including Tony Hawk and Aston Kutcher, to church service leaders, estate agents, news reporters and more.

What’s So Good About It?

If you’re hosting a live event or conference and want to keep your consumers up to date then a live-stream could come in pretty handy for you.

How About The Downsides?

Because the streams are only available to view live, they cannot be re-watched at a later date, giving Meerkat something of the ephemeral nature of an app such as Snapchat. Oh that, and it’s getting a really bad press…

Despite being just three weeks old, Meerkat has already been labelled a “parasite” for using user’s Twitter credentials to form its own social network. But Twitter’s put a stop to that [see below].

Will Meerkat Be The Next Big Thing?

In our humble opinion…no.

Given that Twitter has just revoked Meerkat’s access to Twitter graph, we’d imagine the app’s follower growth will slow and plateau considerably. Besides, with its recent acquisition of Periscope – a video company - Twitter is already looking to build its own video-streaming service which is bound to be a more popular option for existing Twitter users.

That said, Meerkat already has a strong head start on Twitter, in regards to video streaming, and if it can continue to grow at this rate then the newbie could quite easily become the next big thing….

Watch this space!