Whitney and Nicolas discuss a popular article from eCommerce Nation and share their advice on maximizing TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and new apps like BeReal.
Learn how eCommerce buyers are influenced by social media and use it to discover what to buy. Discover ways to take full advantage of the most popular social networks. Gain an understanding of where your ideal audience is spending their time and what they like most on each platform. Find out how to reach your target market and get tips on gaining visibility through optimized content. Uncover the latest ways to interact with consumers, so you can improve your products and marketing. Hear how digital media has changed the way consumers behave towards brands.
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The US livestreaming market is expected to hit $25 billion by 2023. That’s why now is the time to build your skills, understand the medium, and ensure that your livestreams are successful.
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Ways To Promote And Sell Well On Social Media
In this episode, we are talking about how to utilize social media to promote your eCommerce business to better understand your audience and to connect with potential partners. We’re going to break down each of the major platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. We have a wonderful resource that Nicolas found. It’s from a website called ECommerce Nation. Nicolas, I’m curious. How did you come across this article? What was it about it that resonated with you?
First of all, ECommerce Nation is a French company. As a French myself, I got the French connection here. More than that, if you are somewhat active on LinkedIn, you probably have seen a lot of activity around this report altogether. Social media is a big trend. As a matter of fact, what we’ll see is that just last 2021, the number of users grew by almost 10%. It’s a pretty astonishing number. The number is there. It’s some number like four-something billion people on it. Ten percent is a pretty astonishing number. That report itself generated a lot of conversation on LinkedIn.
We started to dive into it. I felt it’s a wonderful resource when you think about your strategy, especially when you think it through the lens of eCommerce, like, “Where do I go? Where is my audience? What should I do?” We quite often talk about social media. People know about social media. It’s important. When you see some of those numbers, you’re like, “Did I know all of that?” That’s what I’m hoping we can talk about here.
It’s interesting when it comes to social media, which has been my area of focus for the past years. I’m constantly learning new things. I appreciate resources like this that have up-to-date statistics that break things down. This was a well-composed article, very helpful, and easy to scan. If you take the time to read it line by line, it’s filled with helpful information.
It starts off by sharing some stats like how 87% of buyers are influenced by social media and their content in their purchasing behavior. That’s helpful when it comes to eCommerce companies as well as content creators. On this show, we’re talking to both sides, bridging this gap together, and helping people understand the power of social media when it comes to selling things.
The article also goes into how social networks attract 4.62 billion users this 2022. That’s almost 60% of the world’s population. A huge part of the world is on there with major opportunities. That’s why you can promote and sell your products directly on these platforms. Nicolas, you’re well-suited to talk about things like how these platforms are now integrating features, including live shopping and advertising campaigns. I’m curious about your perspective on eStreamly and how you’ve been looking at opportunities to partner with some of these social platforms.
When you think about live shopping in the context of social media, it was someone at TikTok has mentioned. I don’t think we’ve talked about it in the context of this show yet. For them, they’re talking about the idea that shoppers are moving away from a search-based behavior to a content-based type search. The idea is that we used to go to Amazon or Google to search for a product and get a recommendation. Those are the five top product that pops up and then make your decision and then purchase.
Shoppers are moving away from search-based type behavior to a content-based type of search. Click To TweetAt least what’s happening in China and what the TikTok folks are believing is that the content is going to be your first approach. When you think about eCommerce, when you think about social media, there’s no better place to get that content first. There are creators who are talking and engaging with your product every day. There are brands that are trying to create their way on social media and trying to get exposure. How do you get that? Discovery is going to be done more and more on social media. Instagram is already a big place for that. TikTok is getting its fair share as well.
The next question is, from the discovery, where do you go? We still see a lot of things. You discover on TikTok, on Facebook, wherever. The next thing people do is make a search on Google, find your product, and land on your website. The next opportunity for social media is to have that viability directly on social. Facebook and Instagram already have somewhat with the Facebook store and Instagram store.
When you think about live streaming, we’re still in the infancy of that. When you look at it, who has that now? In China, everyone has that. If you step away from China and look at, “How do I make my purchase through live streaming?” at the moment, except if you work with a company like CommentSold or switchers that offer comment buying on Facebook, that’s pretty much the extent of what’s out there.
It’s a very exciting opportunity for a company like eStreamly to try to bridge that gap, work with social media, and say, “How do we work with your own flow of things?” and then have that viability right there on social media. That’s what we have taken as an approach to trying to partner with social media. At the end of the day, social media doesn’t want to have those audiences. They’re trying to maintain the audience where they are. How do you make that discoverability there and then the purchase happening also on social media?
I love that this article gets into more indirect ways for social media to benefit your company. A lot of people, when they’re assessing the return on investment for something like this, might forget about how it’s not just about making the sales directly, but you can get in touch with your audience directly. You can answer their questions. You can thank them for their interest. You can keep them informed of the news. This is all through that interaction. You can get feedback from people, which can help you improve your products and services.
Social media has always been interesting to me because it is helpful to have a goal, but not be super attached to it. Instead, look for all of these other ways that you can be supported on your way to reaching your goal versus getting frustrated if you don’t have the results that are directly related to your goal right away.
It is helpful to have a goal, but don’t get too attached to it. Instead, look for all of these other ways that you can be supported on your way to reaching your goal. Click To TweetThrough all these years that I’ve been studying and consulting on social media, I’ve noticed that the people who do the best on there are those who are consistent, those who are flexible, who are patient, and who are experimenting. This is a great opportunity to jump into this article and look at what is recommended when it comes to the eCommerce world.
We were thinking that we would go through each of the platforms here that were discussed on ECommerce Nation. They put them in order of their ranking in terms of the top ten social media platforms. Some of them include WeChat, Douyin, QQ, and Sina Weibo, which is another platform I’m not familiar with. We can certainly touch upon those, if we have time, Nicolas.
With no further ado, let’s start with the most famous social media platform, which is Facebook. When you were going through this, Nicolas, what stood out to you as a learning in terms of a takeaway? Was there something that surprised you here? Is there something that you’re going to take action on, or perhaps something you’re already doing as a company owner that’s working well for you?
For me, the first thing that stands out from Facebook, as you think about Facebook, is what gender distribution is. First of all, Facebook is 56% men. I was like, “Wow.” I was completely expecting the opposite. I see my wife on it. I see friends of my wife on it, but I’m not on it. I’m on it, but I’ll say it’s just for the purpose of getting eStreamly going. I’m not very active. That was the first big thing.
Also, what was interesting is that they say they’re the major part. If you look in terms of user demographic, it’s men between the ages of 25 and 34. I was expecting a little skew toward more older generation. Although, I was thinking it would be much older than that, to be frank with you. Millennials are there, apparently, and the majority are in the men’s group category. That was very interesting.
Although, when we go back to livestream shopping, Facebook is the place to be for livestreaming. They have livestream capabilities for a very long time. There are a bunch of Facebook groups where you can do livestream shopping without 24/7 something to sell there. Interestingly, Meta announced that Facebook would no further go after livestream shopping market for Facebook itself. It’s an interesting perspective. Here is the place where you have the most livestream shopping activity in the world, except if you take China apart, yet Facebook decided to remove itself from that.
Facebook is definitely the place to be for livestreaming. They have had live streaming capabilities for a very long time. Click To TweetWhen you think about it, there are a bunch of reasons for that. Meta is somewhat in trouble, I’m assuming, with all the iOS changes in privacy, their pixel are getting challenged. It’s harder and harder and more costly to make ads. People are thinking about that. Their ad revenue went down quite significantly. They have invested $1 billion in the metaverse. If Meta is not outside of livestream shopping, they are doubling down with Instagram. They are just realigning resources.
Now, there are players that we were just mentioning at the beginning of this episode that enable you to have somewhat of a good experience through comments and doing live shopping. Based on that, Facebook decided to say, “Let’s post a live shopping there. Let’s focus your effort on Instagram for live shopping.” That’s an interesting one.
A lot of people are talking about Facebook. It’s still the number one platform in the world. It’s one of the most used. If you’re a global company and you want to have this global reach, you must be on Facebook. What that data doesn’t say and what we haven’t looked at is how it is compared to the US market. I’m pretty sure we know that Facebook is very popular in countries like Brazil and some other countries. Maybe there is a big group. It’s still very predominant in all types of countries. I don’t know how you feel about Facebook. I’d love to hear from you.
I’ll be honest, I have mixed feelings about Facebook. I’ve worked with them directly and had pleasant experiences, but certainly, some of the things that come out in the media don’t paint the best light. They are moving things forward, renaming themselves as Meta and doing things in the metaverse, and, to your point, have so many tools.
I remember when Facebook Live came out and how amazing that was. I was using that right away. You could see how the industry used that as a jumping-off point. When you look on the ECommerce Nation website, they have all these tools listed for Facebook and Ad Center, Facebook shops, page insights, Facebook pixel, and Facebook IQ, which I wasn’t familiar with this name. It’s a tool that provides data and analysis and user behavior as well as marketing tips that you can apply to Facebook. That’s pretty neat. They’re always developing these things.
I also like that ECommerce Nation lists out tips to apply for each platform. It’s interesting to see what they recommend on Facebook. They say visual content videos and images tend to have the most potential for sharing. They encourage you to create a reaction among users. You can use their visibility and targeting tools. To your point, Nicolas, use Facebook Lives and to create appointments with your community. I don’t know if they just mean through events.
You can have your calendar sync on Facebook, and people can book time with you on Facebook. That’s an interesting one. I love marketing act. There’s a big marketing act with Facebook now. If you look at the top pages only by brand, not by creator or by influencers at the brand level, the number three brand or enterprise on Facebook is YouTube. If you think about it, the number one is Samsung with 159 million fans. You’ve got Google with 106, and then YouTube with 84 million fans. It’s a brilliant act from YouTube to try to sneak them in there and say, “We exist too. Come visit through your videos with us.”
It’s interesting to look at something like this and see how much is offered and do an audit. That’s what I’m hoping as a listener, but even for us, Nicolas and I working together, how I work with my other clients, how I do things myself, I’m thinking in my head, “What are things I didn’t know about? What are things I could improve? What things can I let go of after looking at something like this and just assessing it?” Speaking of Facebook and its rename with Meta, we have Instagram, which is owned by them. That was acquired in 2012. It’s pretty amazing. This is interesting to look at, too, like the audience demographics. I’m curious for you, Nicolas. What surprised you here, if anything?
With Instagram, it sounds like the skew of the population is a little younger than Facebook. No surprise there. I was expecting to be much more predominantly women as well for Instagram in terms of audience. It’s pretty even, 48/52, 48% woman, 52% man. That surprised me. I was expecting this to be much more skewed toward women. That was the big surprise. They still have a 1.4 billion monthly user, almost 1.5. It’s a pretty astonishing number. It’s pretty big. This hasn’t gone without controversy. We know that TikTok has taken a lion’s share of what they are trying to do, and they’re going after them aggressively.
I’m pretty sure you have seen in the news that Instagram says that they were going to introduce more and more videos and short-form content. There was a big no-no from a lot of community members in the Instagram community saying, “Let Instagram be.” There were even GoFundMe pages and a lot of things going on. It’s interesting.
When you think about Facebook and Insta, they are at this moment where they are the social media of several years ago and they need to reinvent themself. Now, the reinvention is video, but there is a clash. They have such a massive amount of users that are used by, “I want to have a nice picture on Instagram. I don’t want to be the next TikTok.” There is a lot of conflict there. We have to remember that those social media make money by you using them by running ads. They run ads on the way you consume. If people are more and more consuming videos and less and less, they are struggling. That’s an interesting thing going on there.
If you think about live shopping, in this case, Instagram is an interesting one because you can do live shopping on Instagram. You have the ability to go live. Instagram, by default, doesn’t let you go live from a third-party platform. In eStreamly, we were able to work this out. We now are able to simulcast on Instagram. They started to ramp up their offering on the livestream. Now, you can schedule an event that you couldn’t before. They let you see the event afterward. They have made a lot of improvement, but it’s still cranky to find a livestream event on Instagram.
I invite you if you know that someone’s going to go live on Instagram to try to find out how you see that person. It’s still difficult. It’s either they push you the content and then you consume it or if you are a brand and want to say, “I’ll be live,” it’s still a little difficult to get someone who is maybe not a super savvy Instagram user to find you. They’re doing a lot of progress. They just introduced buying ability in the comment section from Instagram. I am hoping that we can get to play with that a little bit and see if we can help the brand tie up commerce directly through comments on the Instagram side.
I love your attention to how all of these platforms would work for somebody live streaming in eCommerce, Nicolas. Up until working with eStreamly, I wasn’t paying attention to things from that angle. I didn’t know about being able to buy from the comments element of Instagram until I heard it from you.
This is a good reason for the readers to not only subscribe to this show but to pay attention to what Nicolas posts on social media because you always share so much great information. You mentioned LinkedIn. You’re very active on Twitter. We’re also working now behind the scenes to get more involved on TikTok and posting more often on Instagram too. I noticed the list on ECommerce Nation doesn’t go in order of the top platforms, but the next one in this list is LinkedIn. As I just mentioned, Nicolas, you are so great on LinkedIn. Should we go to that or is there anything else that we should cover on the Instagram side of things?
Personally, I am a big fan of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the place where I hang out and see things. I love it because it has a lot of professional content and people talking about each other. I don’t know what you feel about it, but we are seeing it getting more and more social than it used to be. It used to be that place where you have all the resumes of everyone. The longer the title, the longer you know that that person is probably not legit. You see that the person is going to say, “I do X, Y, Z, and that and that,” and their title. You’re like, “You do a lot of things all of a sudden.”
I found LinkedIn to be quite interesting. Live streaming is becoming something that LinkedIn has been pushing quite a bit. You can live stream on LinkedIn. It’s interesting if you want the B2B space. They’re also trying their own version. I don’t know if that’s their mindset, but I like the idea of thinking it this way. It’s their live shopping version of the B2B. They just announced that they are going to release it. It’s on October 1st or September 1st where you will have the ability on your live to drop a link that you could bring to a website or a spec or anything.
Think about you are making a webinar about why your AC machine now is much better than the others, whatever. Now, people watching that content can get a spec of that machine, that equipment, or whatever comes to mind. LinkedIn remains the B2B place to learn about brands and interaction. We see that. The big account over there is Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, or it’s not brand-related. It is brand, but it’s more from the B2B perspective.
The other thing that I liked was LinkedIn. I’m pretty sure you’ll appreciate that, which is the influencers if there are LinkedIn influencers or B2B influencers. We saw a study that was published by The Tilt, which has a wonderful newsletter. I encourage any creators reading this to go to their website, TheTilt.com. It’s a free newsletter. They share so much things in the content creation world. They were saying that their research was a LinkedIn influencer will get 20-25% more per post than on any of the social. It’s interesting. If you are a content creator and creating content, LinkedIn is still the place that is still trying to find their way around social. There’s still opportunity. It’s not as crowded as Insta or Facebook. That might be a cool one for you.
I couldn’t agree more. LinkedIn’s been interesting to watch from the content creator side of things. I remember I’ve been on LinkedIn for a long time, and most people associate it with how it used to be, which was very business-focused, a place where you would go to get a job or recruit people and do all these more business-type things.
I’ve seen people have great success through networking on LinkedIn, but there certainly has been a pivot. They have created so many cool tools on their platforms. I’ve used their live streaming on there and thought it was great. They’ve started to prioritize video content in a lot of ways. They have a lot of great tools. They have the Sales Navigator, which is great for quickly finding prospects, but you could use this to find influencers. You could use this to do your research on your ideal customer. They have an advertising management tool. They have something called Waalaxy that I’ve never heard of that’s for sales prospecting, and Shield, which is monitoring and analysis.
They also have a premium service you can upgrade to. I activated it because I was given a free trial of it. It was interesting. After I activated that premium account, all of a sudden, people started reaching out to me. It increased my visibility, and all I did was activate that premium. I hadn’t logged in to LinkedIn in a few weeks. I went on there earlier and suddenly there were all these people who had messaged me. There was certainly something that shifted by trying out one of their services.
Whether it’s LinkedIn or any of these platforms, trying out the premium that they offer could be a quick way to make more connections with people. Also, examining all the different types of content in addition to live videos or previously created edited videos. You can also do newsletters on LinkedIn. You can upload articles and PDFs. You can have some great SEO opportunities through what you put in your bio. LinkedIn is an incredibly important platform to prioritize. It makes great sense for people in the business world. Go ahead.
One thing on LinkedIn is the webinar section, creating a live on LinkedIn where people may not show up during your event, but they’re watching. I did only one webinar on LinkedIn. We should do more. Like any business person, you are thinking like, “Do I have the time?” At least out of that webinar, I had 3 or 5 people saying, “I watched your webinar on LinkedIn.” I’m like, “Wow.” I was not expecting that. It’s an interesting thing. People are watching your webinars. I’ll encourage anyone in the audience. If you’re doing a webinar, just plug it on LinkedIn. Have it there. Simulcasting doesn’t cost much in those days.
Speaking of different opportunities to repurpose content, there’s Twitter. It’s so interesting how Twitter has changed over time. That was the first platform that I started utilizing for social media because I was on Facebook very early. I considered Facebook a place back in the day where I was connecting with people I knew. This whole idea of social media and social networking was brand new. For me, that was 2009 or maybe even 2008. Around that time, it was seeing something evolve and watching how people were using it. In 2022, we see people starting to depend on it for their news and their conversations. People use it to talk about television shows and current events and make jokes.
Nicolas, you always do a great job with your memes and the weekly newsletter that you send out for eStreamly. I’m curious how many of those might come from Twitter because it’s amazing for things like that. It’s also great for the articles that you share. I’d love to hear more about what you think about Twitter and how it benefits you behind the scenes.
Twitter is a very interesting one. First of all, it is very skewed men. Seventy percent of the population on Twitter is men. It’s a much more intimate social media. It was Brian Fanzo saying this. I love how he described it. He states, “One too many one-on-one conversations,” in some ways. It’s this idea of having these chats, but then multiple people can chat with you on one thread of a conversation.
A lot of people are dismissing Twitter, but I love that idea of engagement. It’s relatively easy to engage the audience. I haven’t been experiencing that myself because I didn’t reach that level, but when you have over 800 followers, all of a sudden, Twitter opens up space for you. You get way more engagement. You start to have way more things going on. It’s hard to get to that first 800 followers, but then from that moment on, it’s an active environment for you. I encourage your brand to try to find that out.
A lot of people dismiss Twitter, but it's big on engagement. It's relatively easy to engage an audience. Click To TweetWe also have seen that Twitter loves videos. I don’t know if you went out on Twitter. I’m personally watching a bunch of live streaming on Twitter. SpaceX does a lot of live stream. They always livestream on Twitter, so I watch all their moonshot and all that. It’s pretty cool there. There are also some brands. I was talking to a few creators and brands that say they have been very successful with Twitter. When I was asking like, “Why is it successful?” they said, “Because no one is there.”
You have all that audience. They’re also here and they also hang out. They spend a lot of time here and no one is catering for them. We’re here. We are providing video content. People just want to engage. Twitter just launched some live shopping capabilities as well. There were a couple of live that went on, where you can go live and you have the buy button there. Hopefully, they extend that so they make it easier for brands to go live on Twitter and sell. That’s an interesting one too. That is worth exploring for sure.
Even just using it to stay in the know about what’s going on. As explained in this article but also recommended across social media strategies, knowing what’s trending is key to performing well on a lot of these platforms. Twitter is a fantastic place because it’s so real-time. It’s mostly text-based content. You can also use hashtags to quickly follow things. You can see whatever’s happening in the world very quickly.
In fact, if something happens in Los Angeles, where I live, I will often go to Twitter to figure out what’s going on, because it’s one of the first places people will post. Whereas it’s not quite as easy to find something on Facebook, I find. Facebook search capabilities are very different. With Twitter, if you type in Los Angeles and look at the most recent posts, you’ll probably find the answer to whatever you’re wondering is going on in Los Angeles, for example. If you type in a product name, you can find a lot of information there too.
Twitter has Twitter for Business tools. They have a TweetDeck, which helps you manage and schedule your posts. You can use Buffer to do that as well. They have a tool that allows you to develop a customized chat box to interact with your followers. There is something called Talk Walker that I didn’t know about, which can help you monitor and analyze social media. Twitter is known for being helpful in customer relations and giving them support. A lot of people utilize that as a way to communicate with people about what’s going on. I mentioned the hashtags. You have an unlimited number of characters to post about too, so you can’t overdo it.
Let’s not forget about Twitter Spaces. Twitter Spaces is a big thing. As a brand, you should be on Twitter Spaces. I’m not saying not every day or not every month whatsoever, but you should try to find your way into Twitter spaces and engage your community there. It’s such a great tool to have conversations about what’s going on and for people to access and talk with you. The fact that there’s no video makes it a very inclusive as well as a passive experience. You will have people walking their dogs at the same time that they talk to you and talk to the audience. The audio quality is good. I personally love Twitter Spaces. It’s much better in my point of view than Clubhouse or even some of those alternatives that have been out there.
One thing that Twitter has been good at is the limitation of characters. When you think about it, I personally tend to ramble a bit. I have a thought or idea and then I will make a whole story and I will be lost before I’ll actually be able to pass on what I’m trying to say. With Twitter, you have to be very short and concise about what you’re saying. You can do a thread or something like that.
When you think about it, we know that the attention span of humans is declining. People are spending less and less time. There was this article from TikTok research saying that as an eComm brand, you have only eight seconds to convince someone to say, “I want to know more about your product.” When you think about humans in general, the attention span of people is eight seconds anyway.
When you engage in a conversation, you have eight seconds to get the attention of someone. You better be good at what you are going to tell them. Twitter forces you artificially by limiting the number of character to either invent yourself and be interesting or to create content that people wants to respond to. That’s what’s great about Twitter. I can only see the positive on that and grow for the future as people try to get things shorter and shorter over time.
When you engage in a conversation, you have eight seconds to have the attention of someone. You better be good at what you are going to tell them. Click To TweetTo your point, that’s such great practice because short content, whether it’s text-based, video-based, or even live, just optimizing what you are going to say in a small amount of time is key. Having some barriers forced upon you can be helpful, even if it’s just for practice. Speaking of time, Nicolas, we could spend so much time. This article also covers Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. We should skip over to TikTok next. What do you think?
Let’s talk about TikTok. TikTok is such a fun platform. Let’s do that.
I’m super curious about your viewpoint of TikTok, Nicolas. Many people associate TikTok with teenagers, twenty-year-olds, and people in college. I found that statistically, it’s spread out equally across all demographics, age-wise, especially. In this article, it says that there are 60% women and 40% men, and 60% of the app’s population is between 16 and 24. I don’t remember if that aligns with the data that I have, but that still leaves 40% of people who are probably on the older side. They could be under 16, but 60% is not as high as some people might think for an app like that. What is your perspective then, Nicolas, given that you’re not a sixteen-year-old? How has it evolved over time from a business standpoint?
In my first encounter with TikTok, you found it to be a cool and fun app to hang out, but I found it daunting in the sense of, “If I want to interact with the app, I have to create all that video content.” The first thing you think about video is like, “What am I going to do with the whole production?” TikTok is removing so much barrier with its filters. They’re making the content as short as possible and everything. At the end of the day, it’s relatively easy for you as a person to just start posting on TikTok.
I’m always surprised when I post a video on TikTok. I didn’t post that many, but every time I posted something, I was like, “I feel I’m so great. I’m soon to be creating a Star Wars.” It has this empowering moment, where in a few minutes you can create a video that looks somewhat appealing, at least to me, it looks appealing. It has this moment of gratification of like, “This is what I created. It’s pretty cool and I’m releasing it.”
TikTok has this hook algorithm in some way. If your video is okay, it’s going to go viral. It’s going to go fast and people are going to watch it. You have this moment, where you are all smiley and like, “My video went on like crazy and everything.” What’s interesting is that even if your video is bad, and God knows I’ve done some bad video, you still get 6,000 views. I’m like, “How could that even be possible?” It’s interesting from that standpoint.
From a brand perspective, think about the reach you can have. I’ve seen a lot of creators and brands either trying to say, “I need to figure out TikTok. How do I get into TikTok?” I don’t think you need to try to figure it out. It’s so easy, just try it out. Worst case scenario, you try out for three months. You delete that account and you create another account. It’s that easy. I will encourage any brands to try out.
In my view, what people are missing about TikTok is a lot of people are thinking, “It’s a social media about video content.” TikTok is going to take a big place in eCommerce for the years to come. They are very vocal about that. There have been a lot of articles about TikTok dropping live shopping. I have no belief that’s the case. They’re doubling down on live shopping. They are trying to find new ways to engage creators. As a matter of fact, there are some cool creators now on TikTok who are making a pretty decent amount of money selling directly on TikTok. They’re only going to increase that. It’s a fantastic opportunity for creators to try out new things and get a decent share of the pie. That’s an interesting one from my point of view.
That was well said. You covered it incredibly well from the perspective of how to use it from a business and with eCommerce. For me, I’m on TikTok every single day, mostly watching. I go through phases of posting videos, but I love it from an entertainment standpoint. I’ve made a great connection. We’ve found guests for the show on TikTok. I’ve found them for my other podcast. I’ve made friends on TikTok.
The networking there is surprisingly great. A lot of people are on TikTok because they appreciate the authenticity. Up until the current day, I don’t know how long this will continue, it felt less curated. Certainly, you can find content on there that’s very polished. It looks like someone spent a ton of time and/or money on it. A lot of the content is known for feeling like somebody did it quickly and they didn’t put a ton of effort into it, or it just comes naturally to them. They’re just being themselves. There’s a growing trend, especially for younger people, in that teen, twenty-year-old demographic, who are doing videos from angles that are not very flattering and with bad lighting, and they’re busting this myth that you have to look Instagram-worthy.
On Instagram, it is known for looking like the highlight reel, looking very edited, and well thought out. On TikTok, you can easily get away, if not thrive by making content, looking your worst. You can do it with bad lighting and you can look strange. You can do something in 30 seconds and move on with your life there. Speaking of which, there is a platform that is not talked about in this article but is worth mentioning. I’m studying BeReal now. Are you familiar with this platform, Nicolas?
Everyone talks about it now, so it’s pretty high on the radar. I’ve tried it. My concern was I had to send an invite to my friends, which I’m like, “Most of those people, I don’t know them.” There’s only one person that was on BeReal that technically I could do it. I stopped there. The concept is interesting. It’s about like, “This is the moment. This is a snapshot.” I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
I bring it up because it is embodying this idea of being real and also not putting in a lot of time and effort. The app is designed to prioritize doing something at the moment. Meaning that an alert comes up once a day at a random time saying, “Now is the time to be real.” From what I understand, the developers created it so that everybody would post around the same time, so you could see what all your friends are doing at the same time, which is neat, but it also gives you constraints.
You have less than two minutes to create your post. It’s not a video. There’s very little text. You can write a short caption on there, but it’s even shorter than Twitter. It uses the back-facing camera to snap a picture of whatever you are looking at or what you’re doing and then also captures right after that, the front-facing camera to capture yourself, but you can’t preview it. You don’t get to adjust the lighting, adjust your hair, your clothes, or your makeup. You’re just whatever you look like in that moment, and you can redo it. Sometimes I’ll do it three times until I feel satisfied, but I aim to do it without much thought or a redo because I feel like that’s part of the app. It’s very interesting.
I’ve heard rumors that Instagram or Facebook are already working on their own version of it, which makes sense. They tend to do that. I’m curious how it will influence the other platforms. For anyone who’s thinking about it, much like Clubhouse, who you brought up earlier, we don’t know what’s going to happen with it. I don’t feel like it has the momentum it did in the beginning, but as you mentioned, it influenced Twitter Spaces. People are still using Clubhouse, but maybe Twitter Spaces has more longevity.
We could see the same thing happen with BeReal. On that same note, one platform that’s mentioned in this article we’ve been referencing is Snapchat. I’m shocked that Snapchat has stayed around for as long as it has. I thought once Instagram, Facebook, and all these other platforms started offering stories or whatever else they call them, even TikTok does this now, I thought Snapchat wouldn’t stick around, but Snapchat has somehow found a niche of people, kept them on there and they keep developing in unique ways. They’ve done great things.
They’re thriving. They kept on always growing in terms of audiences. What’s very attractive for brands that are looking at Snapchat is you can talk to a Snap rep and create a VR experience with your product. Snapchat is all about this idea of like, “We can create content. Use filters that are augmenting reality or virtual reality and you can snip your brand in.” There has been some cool activation with big brands as well as smaller brands. They’re trying to be accessible. It’s catering to a very young audience. I’ve heard about brands thriving on the eCommerce side with Snapchat. It’s an interesting one to look at.
To circle back to BeReal, I wouldn’t even dismiss that platform as being taken over. Who knows what will happen with Clubhouse? It’s different theories here, where you can be on every single platform. I don’t know if that’s the best option. As you mentioned earlier, Nicolas, it is joining them, having an account on there, experimenting with them, understanding them, having your profile set up, so if somebody discovers you on there, they can find you on whatever other platform or website that you’re on.
Having that presence is helpful and understanding them enough so that you can see the pros and cons and watch the apps develop over time. As I said, in all my years of studying social media, I’ve seen all these platforms go through different phases. Some of them have done things that I did not expect. Stay curious, continue to experiment, and stay in the know. You’ve got us here on this show. As I said, we have episodes every single day to keep you informed and bring on experts who can help develop your strategy, whether you’re an eCommerce creator, an eCommerce business, or you want to get into this field. There are so many different angles that you can look at this.
We’ve got Nicolas and all of his wonderful knowledge. He’s active on Twitter and LinkedIn. We’re getting more active on Instagram and TikTok as the eStreamly platform. Nicolas also sends out a wonderful weekly newsletter in which he summarizes a lot of this news. He finds the best articles. You’re a great resource, Nicolas. You do so much. I don’t know how you manage it all. Each week, I’m amazed at what you’re able to pull together. Thanks for bringing this article to us here on the show.
I appreciate that. One last piece of encouragement for the audience is that it was Joshua Krazer who was saying, “What TikTok, Snapchat, and BeReal are creating is this opportunity that it’s okay to create content fast because you can create the next content. Don’t look at yourself to be on the perfection.” The older generation is thinking of content as, “It has to be perfect.” Those platforms are giving authorization not to be perfect, but they just want more content. Create a piece of content. It’s okay. It is the way it is. Try another one. That’s an opportunity because it gives us access to try a lot of different things. On that note, I’m excited to see you next episode.
We have some wonderful guests lined up on the show, so be sure to subscribe so you’ll get notified when those episodes are out. We have five guests lined up and they all are unique. We’re excited about those conversations. We haven’t had them yet. Stay tuned along with us. We’ll be back again.. Please visit eStreamly.com. Bye for now. See you next episode.
