The Friendship Report

Snapchat was founded on the belief that talking with photos and videos, with our real friends, was more personal and more fun than texting or keeping up on social media. Since then,we’ve been evolving the platform, but never straying from this core mission to help close friends express themselves and be creative together.

With the goal of really understanding what friendship is all about, all around the world, we undertook a massive global study around friendship. The Friendship Report, commissioned in partnership with Protein Agency, polled 10,000 nationally representative people ages 13 to 75 in Australia, France, Germany, India, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the U.K. and the U.S.

Read on to see some key findings and download the full report below.

“Honesty” and “authenticity” are the most important qualities of a best friend and “having a large social network to tap into” is of least importance when making friends. 

Culture impacts what we value in our friends too. Having friends who are “intelligent and cultured” is more valued by those in India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, whereas being “non-judgmental” matters more to those in the U.S., Europe, and Australia.

When it comes to how people like to communicate and what they share, generation of course plays a role: Globally, Gen Z and millennials are unsurprisingly emphatic in their love for talking with friends online—only 7% and 6% respectively said they don’t enjoy it, compared with 13% of Gen X and 26% of baby boomers. 

Interacting with friends, whether in person or online, also leaves us feeling overwhelmingly positive emotions: “happy,” “loved,” and “supported” are the three most reported globally. 

Of Gen Z and millennials, 61% believe that video and photos help them to express what they want to say in a way that they can’t with words. 

We also see that millennials globally come out on top as the most “share happy" of the generations. They’re the least likely to say “I wouldn’t share that” across all categories surveyed and are also more likely to want “as many friends as possible” than any other generation.

Gen Z doesn’t appear to following in millennials’ footprints though, rather they are seeking intimacy in their friendships, and craving open and honest relationships more than any other generation.