Trend Newsletter:
Tiktok meltdown...
Welcome to the first edition of Abstract Trend Newsletter!
Staying up to date with the ever-moving world of marketing and social is a monumental task, which is why we’re here to help recap the key news items from the month that will impact your campaigns and marketing efforts.
Plus, we’ll be sharing insights from the team on their favourite campaigns of the month, explaining why they worked and what lessons brands should be taking away from their success.
TikTok’s Timeout
For a terrifying 12 hours, TikTok went dark over in the States after a ban was put in place on the app. During this half-day, the app was unusable for audiences who had originally downloaded the app in US territories.
As over 2024, there was an average of over 170 million daily users on the app in the US. Even for global brands and influencers, this was a huge loss because a massive portion of their audience was now gone. If they were based in the US, the platform was no longer a viable part of their social strategy. As a result, Businesses and Content creators had to rapidly try and move their audience over to other platforms.
While the ban didn’t last long and TikTok’s longevity in the states is beginning to seem more solidified, there is a lesson that all social media managers and campaign strategists should consider - a cross-platform approach is always essential to maintaining a consistent audience.
Influencers and their Big Little Lies
As TikTok began to shutdown, a trend piqued in the final few hours of the app, where influencers and brand would reveal a ‘secret’ they’d been withholding from their audience for the entirety of their account’s time on the app. For many, this was revealing small ‘Behind The Scenes’ secrets like how Chris Olsen revealed that in his infamous coffee delivery videos, the cups were actually always empty – something many viewers had already figured out. For brand accounts like DuoLingo, it was revealing who had been their brand mascot the entire time.
However, more than a few influencers spilled some secrets about their accounts that left their followers betrayed – Lifestyle and fitness videobloggers stating that they never adhered to all the tips that they had been offering their videos in daily content. Once the app restarted, there was a lack of trust established between creator and viewer, meaning that their followers and engagement dropped rapidly.
What can we learn from this? Authenticity is EVERYTHING. Even little lies can hurt your brand if audiences ever learn the truth.
While TikTok was busy forcing marketing managers to adjust their social strategies, Instagram decided it needed to spook some of our graphic designers by rolling out an update to it’s profile grid. Instead of the classic squares, there is now rectangle portrait (4:5). You’re still able to post in the square format but on your grid, content will be cut to fit.
Send to a friend...
Another Instagram insight! If you’re looking to grow your audience then sends and shares are the top metric you should be watching. Content that is shared to other accounts will help grow your following as it signals the algorithm to also show your posts to more users via Explore, recommendations, etc.
Likes are the essential metric to watch if you want more of your followers to see our posts.