As the lifestyles of consumers are increasingly digitised and globalised, new technological developments are transforming how consumers interact with social media, creating compelling consumer behavioural trends.

The majority of innovation stems from China, which has a more connected and personal digital ecosystem. However, worldwide accelerating rates of content consumption, shoppable media and new forms of virtual communication are increasing pressure on businesses to increase the responsiveness of their retail and product strategies and time to market. While YouTube announced in October 2020 that it would be making its videos more shoppable, TikTok entered the market in December via fashion livestreams. Similarly, Instagram’s Reels offering and Shop tab for users to connect with brands and creators — and to discover products.

In conversation with BoF’s Robin Mellery-Pratt, Benjamin Duvall, Linkfluence’s chief evangelist, and Pablo Mauron, partner & managing director of China at the Digital Luxury Group discussed how brands and retailers can successfully tap into the emerging global social media trends driving growth in today’s global market.

BoF shares the key insights below.

Commercialise Short Video Within the Customer Journey

BD: Short video is by far the most engaged format of social media today. It has accelerated and democratised the ability to make money via content. Now, rapidly, individual streamers and creators are able to monetise themselves through tools integrated into the platforms on which they operate. For brands, commercialising this content format is key.

This [infrastructure] has seen companies like Bytedance emerge to become one of the ‘big four’ in China. It’s a fundamental offering — access to attention, access to capital and the ability to share creativity and content in a way that’s never been possible before. We will continue to see constant war between the platforms as they calculate their fair share of this movement.

PM: Chinese users spend the most time [now] per day on short video apps — surpassing instant messaging or mobile games. Short videos in China reached 905 million monthly active users, and attrition rates of close to 80 percent. When this short video boom happened in China, there was already e-commerce integration in place. Douyin, for instance, made an impact as a high-performing traffic driver but quickly [established] itself as a legitimate e-commerce contender.

While luxury brands will be asking themselves questions around relevancy and positioning — the success of short video is [unavoidable]. This format is highly popular, with a high penetration rate among a younger audience used across various strategy segments in China. Now, it’s becoming a global phenomenon — truly integrated into the customer journey.

Smaller Brands and Smaller Platforms Should Strategically Partner

BD: There are new platforms emerging all the time. While there is certainly investment capital on the platforms that are willing to wait to figure out how to commercialise. There is opportunity always for small businesses and people to get their content out there on these emerging [forums]. Smaller brands should strike early before these platforms become inundated, or the field starts to be controlled with advertisements, or the attention starts to be monetised and filtered in certain ways.

It comes down to creating a strong brand proposition and a strong story on any [platform], where you relate to a tribe, a group of people who have psychographic, not demographic connections, who are passionate about something, and building a relationship with them. [Then], using some of the fundamental tactics of grassroots marketing, seeding CRM, and empowering these people to own your brand.

PM: Not all platforms at the market entry stage of usage should be treated with the same level of opportunity. WeChat is a fantastic platform, but is completely over considered by emerging brands and is costly to operate on. A platform like Douyin is going to be expensive as well. In the West, you see new platforms that begin to grow. Once they have the user base, you start to hear that they’re struggling with monetisation and their business model. I’ve never seen an online platform in China that didn’t have a business model built in. They’re going to do everything they can to force you, as a brand, to spend money. Weibo, for instance, started to see that advertising budgets were shifting to celebrities and KOLs (key opinion leaders), so began to apply fees to celebrity posts. Xiaohongshu charges collaboration fees for posts featuring KOLs, too. Producing content for these platforms comes at significant cost. Start with your seeding strategy with influencers who operate on very minimum presence. Spend your budget on people that will speak louder than you, or it’s going to be hard to stand out.

AI Solutions Unlocking New Data Sets

BD: The entire AI framework is creating a very effective and useful tool for brands and consumers to tap into that power of data really quickly. The luxury industry has a lot to benefit from this, because of their “top-down” operations. AI can make them much more [customer-oriented], giving them the ability to observe the trends emerging from the ground up.

When you consider the proliferation of creative content, video content and more authentic imagery surfacing from everyday consumers — not just brands, or macro influencers — no marketer, data analyst, or even someone who works in corporate communications has the means to sift through hundreds of thousands or even millions of posts. You can use classical approaches to try to understand the main usage occasions, what’s driving purchase, what’s driving awareness, these type of things. But there’s so much data online and just the pure statistical significance of it means that there are going to be opportunities to link on the long-tail that cannot be picked up.

If an analyst studies the top 100 images from across social, they can pick up on some big ideas. But computer vision can pick up on the top 15 environments where people are consuming or showcasing product. They can see what kind of logos are used or also present the products from other industries they are using and can scan content to facially recognise influencers too. It can provide brands with data-driven insights that can match their explorative, anecdotal approach.

This is a sponsored feature paid for by Linkfluence as part of a BoF partnership.