Snapchat is one of the most popular messaging and picture sharing apps on the App Store today, thanks to its unique spin: snaps disappear shortly after being seen or read. Focusing on keeping photos, videos, and messages ephemeral and disposable helps keep things quick and casual, rather than requiring you to keep a long and complete archive of a serious conversation. Snapchat has added tons of new features since its debut in 2011, regularly overhauling the app and updating old features to keep it up to date. One of Snapchat’s most popular features is the Best Friends list, which is an algorithm-based selection of your in-app friends, based on how often you interact with them.
Best Friends launched as a feature in 2016 and has undergone some changes since then, including changing your friends’ Best Friends data to private. One question that many Snapchat users raise is how often the Best Friends algorithm updates your list. A giant mainframe somewhere running a batch once a day? Or what? In this post, I will explain how often Best Friends data is updated on Snapchat and discuss a few other aspects of this feature.
What is the Best Friends Feature?
Your Best Friends on Snapchat are the ones you interact with the most. Sending a snap, receiving a snap, or joining a group chat together will increase your engagement score. Snapchat’s algorithm then ranks all your friends by their level of interaction with you, and your top contacts are listed as your best friends in the app. If you have relatively few friends on Snapchat or don’t talk to your friends very often, you may have no Best Friend or just one or two friends.
Up to eight of your contacts can be listed as your best friends. When calculating your Best Friends list, Snapchat only looks at the past week, so you can’t one day exchange thousands of messages with someone and expect them to stay on your friends list forever. Although they may seem there for a moment, they will eventually fall off as your contact with them drops to zero.
If you’re looking for your Best Friends list, you can find it at the top of your full contact list sending a snap. You may also notice that some of your best friends have little emoji next to each name, indicating a special reward they currently have. There’s no shortage of emojis you’ll find on this list, and you can even customize them in your settings menu. If you’re looking for some, you’ll see emojis like this.
- A yellow heart is for Snapchat Best Friends.
- A red heart is for your BFF who has been best friends for two weeks.
- Two pink hearts are two months when the person is your ‘Super BFF’.
- A grin emoji is for someone you share with someone else as a best friend.
- A grin emoji is for when you are their best friend but you are not.
- A smiley is for the second and third Snapchat Best Friends.
- Sunglasses emoji means you share your best friend with someone else.
- Fire emoji is for Snapchat Best Friend you are with on Snapstreak.
These can be edited to look exactly the way you want them, with your own custom emojis, simply by going into the settings menu and selecting “Manage” under “Additional Options”.
How often are Snapchat Best Friends updated?
Snapchat hasn’t made it clear how often the algorithm works, but the app seems to be updating all the time. As a result, a single message can make a sudden change to your Best Friends list, like forgetting to message someone a few hours after receiving a message. That said, the app seems to update more frequently after force-closing your phone, so don’t be surprised if you miss viewing an update after sending a message. Depending on your usage history with the app, it may take some time for these data changes to actually change the results of your Best Friends list.
For example, if you have a relatively small number of friends with whom you only chat occasionally, then sending and receiving a few messages with a person can make a big difference in their standing on their Best Friends list, causing the list to change. On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of friends and you’re posting snaps and chats all day, it takes a lot of messages for any big change in your list.
How Can I See My Best Friend List?
From the home page, tap the Friends button (the little chat bubble at the bottom left). Then tap the Send button (the little chat bubble at the top right). Your Best Friends list will be at the top of your friends list, just above your Recents list. You can also access the Best Friends list by taking a photo and then tapping the blue arrow at the bottom right of the screen to go to your Friends page, where they will have their own section.
Is It Possible to Edit My Best Friends List?
Unfortunately, unlike the old MySpace Best Friends list, you can’t control who appears here, as everything in Snapchat’s friends list is automatically designed using an algorithm. The easiest way to change contacts and add them to your list is to work on keeping sending things to the people you want to connect with. Spamming photos or videos and getting spam in return is by far the easiest way to add people you want to have on your friends list, even if it’s not in perfect order.
Snapchat’s Best Friends is one of the app’s many neat features that make everything simple and effective. If you want to know who you interact with the most on Snapchat, now you know how!
