Snapchat may not have a follower count or other popularity indicators like competing platforms, but it does have streaks, which may be the most important metric of all. Like most of the best parts of social media, they're a win for everyone involved.
Snapchat has always been a little weird. It offered a unique gimmick from the start, with its ethereal, self-deleting messages. It never focused on pages or spaces, instead promoting direct connections between people. As a result, it can often feel like communication is at the forefront, which is very different from the "broadcasting your life into the void" vibe on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. There's really not much else to do on Snapchat than talk to people.
In the spirit of interaction, Snapchat users place a ton of value on their Snapchat streaks. Snap streaks are just the way Snapchat keeps count of the number of consecutive days one person has been talking to another. Each user can have a streak with another user, and there are in-app rewards tied to longer streaks, like icons and emoji. The streak increases each day that one person in the conversation sends a snap to the other and then receives a reply, and it's broken if that fails to happen on a given day.
Even a broken streak can be saved, though. Snapchat's support will recover a broken streak after a detailed application process. The form can be found on Snapchat's support website, after selecting Contact Us. This menu will have an option for "My Snapstreaks disappeared" and that will produce the form. It's very straightforward but it'll require gathering some specific information about your account, like the original phone number associated with it, and when the streak was lost. It's also possible to "spoof" this process with carefully-constructed lies as shown in this YouTube video from FozTech.
Why Snapstreaks Are So Important
Snapchat's streaks are important on the surface level and in more profound ways. To Snapchat as a business, they're a way to gamify the service, giving people a fun motivation to log in every day. A big part of how social media platforms grow is by working their way into people's daily routines, so rewarding users for speaking to one another every day ensures at least those two people will be consistent, active users.
For the people using Snapchat, streaks are an indirect gauge of the strength of a relationship. Yes, it's just a dumb number and it's possible to keep it going just by sending a meaningless message back and forth every day. However, even gaming the system in that way is forcing interaction between two people that otherwise would probably not happen. And, for people who don't "cheat", it's a guaranteed connection with someone. People are increasingly becoming less inclined toward phone calls, so having an ongoing, daily conversation is a big deal. In a way, streaks make Snapchat the most "social" media.