Ask what Peach is and you will get two different answers depending on who you’re talking to. Anybody over 25 and not working in social media will tell you that it’s a deliciously sweet and furry fruit that comes from Florida.
The others will show you their iPhone and the sparkly new app of the same name that is getting a lot of attention since it’s launch in the past week.
It has a sprightly, bright look about it and looks effortlessly clean and a little similar to the other messenger platforms people use to chat to their friends. It’s fun, easy-to-grasp and cool. Even it’s web address is http://peach.cool/
Like Snapchat before it, the other breakout app from 2015, it’s magic is in the little details. It’s very easy to sign up to and find your friends, simple to use and has a ton of fun functionality epitomised by it’s ‘magic words’ function.
It works like this – if you type in the word ‘GIF”, Peach will let you search for and insert a GIF into your message stream natively within the app. Sharing visual images and emoji’s seamlessly is as near as essential for millenials especially. It’s also very useful for social media professionals posting on the move who want to enhance their posts without having the time or the will to do an image search followed by an edit session to make the image the right size. Peach will do it all for you.
This would be impressive enough but another tool in Peach’s armoury is ‘draw’. Very simply, it lets you add a hand-drawn image into your stream – a fun little doodle! ‘Shout’ lets you type your text in huge letters with a coloured background to make it stand out even more.
Some early adopters having good success in terms of attracting an audience and attention include the usual suspects like MTV but surprisingly more conservative brands such as Merriam Webster – the biggest dictionary publishers in America. They are using Peach to turn their word definitions and updates into a form of Pictionary and it’s resonating with the audience far more than a simple dry, definition.
Time will tell if it can be a sustained breakout hit or if Facebook and Twitter will just say ‘thank you very much’ and replicate the functionality in their messaging or just give up and buyout the founders but if your key messages or products are visual first it might be worth taking a bite out of this Peach.