Lemon8 - What are the opportunities for brands?

Lemon8, the latest social media app to hit the market, has a vision of "building the most inspiring and informative platform to discover, share, and bring ideas to life."

Created by the same company who created Tiktok, Chinese tech giant Bytedance, the app has been described as a mix between Instagram, Pinterest and the Chinese social media app called Xiaohongshu (or Little Red Book). It launched in Asia in 2020 and the official US launch is set to happen this month. 

As a follow up to my Lemon8 fact sheet last week, I want to encourage brands, particularly those who would fall under the category - Lifestyle - to invest the time now, while it is still early-days, in establishing a presence on the app, and investigating how best you could use it. I believe that it is not only early birds, but also early adopters, who catch the worm.

I highlight lifestyle brands because Lemon8’s categories of beauty, fashion, travel, wellness and food are all about great content curation whether it be images or long blog-style posts. 

With the app’s tagging tool,  fashion creators, for example, can tag clothes in their photos for users to find the designs. Fashion influencers on Lemon8 can "tag" where they bought their clothes and how much they cost. So there is a definite shopping focus in the app, and a great opportunity to take advantage of influencer marketing and collaboration.

Hubspot reports that 50% of millennials trust product recommendations from influencers while 33% of gen Z-ers have bought a product based on an influencer's recommendation in the past three months. In addition, 44% of marketers say that the biggest benefit of working with micro-influencers is that it is less expensive.

App creator ByteDance has recognised this power of influencer marketing and according to the New York Times they are currently working with mid-tier influencers to hype up Lemon8 on TikTok. In addition, Business Insider reports that Lemon8 have a team in New York who are connecting and partnering with creators as part of its expansion strategy.

While we still don’t see many large brands on the app, we all know that consumers are looking to social media to find new brands. As the popularity of the app increases, this is an opportunity to potentially expand your audience. The Influencer Marketing Factory highlights that the ‘Following’ and ‘For You’ options at the top of the app menu will be highly localized, and that this could be a game-changer for those wanting to reach a new market right on their doorstep.

In a time where competition is fierce out there, being active on social media is of utmost importance in my opinion. And I wouldn’t want to miss out on new opportunities to publicise my brand and gain new followers - and neither should you!