Monthly Archives: May 2023

Welcome to HubSpot Marketing News! Tap in for campaign deep dives, the latest marketing industry news, and tried-and-true insights from HubSpot’s media team.

A new social media platform is in town, and it’s quickly picking up steam.

Lemon8 is owned by ByteDance, the China-based parent company that owns TikTok, and it’s had a buzzy debut in the U.S.

It was originally launched in Japan in 2020 and became available in the U.S. and UK in February 2023. In the past month, it’s become the second most-downloaded lifestyle app in the U.S. behind Pinterest.

Speaking of Pinterest…

Lemon8 is described as a Pinterest-Instagram hybrid. At its core, Lemon8 is a photo-sharing app designed to inspire users.

While users and creators have been vocal about their frustrations with Instagram and its unpredictable algorithm over the past couple of years, are people looking for the next Pinterest when they could still use the original?

By the end of 2022, over 450 million active users were on Pinterest. Not too shabby, though the user base is significantly smaller than the likes of YouTube (2.6 billion users), Instagram (2.3 billion users), and TikTok (1.6 billion users).

Though Pinterest has a smaller user base than other social channels, its users are generally happy with the platform. In fact, 80% of Pinterest users feel positive when using it. Nine out of 10 Pinterest users refer to it as a “social media oasis,” and only three out of 10 social media users feel that way about other platforms.

With that in mind, is a “new Pinterest” necessary when the original seems to be doing a good job of keeping its users happy? It all comes down to how the app is used.

While Pinterest users are generally happy with the platform, they essentially use it as a visual search engine.

Many Pinterest users turn to the platform when they’re looking for inspiration related to a specific topic — perhaps a recipe using a certain ingredient, or ways to style a clothing item.  They hop on, find what they’re looking for, and hop off. While it’s great for inspiring purchases, it doesn’t have the addicting factor that platforms like TikTok or Instagram have.

That’s where Lemon8 comes in.

Image Source: Lemon8

I downloaded the app to learn more about its functionality and to see what kind of content is available on it (you know, serious investigative journalism). I was quickly sucked into the beautiful content that aligned eerily close with my interests.

Essentially, using Lemon8 is like having the TikTok algorithm serve you the inspirational content of Pinterest formatted like an Instagram post. The main feed is similar to the Pinterest home page, but the posts are reminiscent of Instagram carousels.

Where did Lemon8 come from, and why is everyone talking about it?

If it seemed like all of a sudden everyone on your TikTok For You Page was talking about Lemon8, that’s because they were.

Per The New York Times, ByteDance enlisted micro-creators from other platforms to begin posting on Lemon8. Naturally, creators who are eager to become early adopters on a new platform would want to share their new social media real estate with their existing followers on other platforms. Whether or not they have been compensated to do so has been speculated, but hasn’t been confirmed. 

Looking at the initial data, the grassroots approach appears to be effective. Since launching in the U.S. in February, Lemon8 has garnered over 17 million downloads in the app store.

How should marketers be looking at Lemon8?

Currently, Lemon8 is heavily user-generated content focused, with no major brands maintaining a notable presence on the app. Though it’s only a matter of time before more brands begin hopping on board.

If your company isn’t ready to start creating Lemon8-specific content, it’s certainly worth getting on the platform to secure your handle and see what’s trending in your niche — particularly for those in the fashion, wellness, and food industries.

It’s also worth noting the user-generated feel of the platform could be a big part of what’s attracting new users. On platforms such as Instagram and TikTok where influencer marketing is to be expected, users can often feel constantly sold to. The authenticity of the organic content on Lemon8 can be a breath of fresh air compared to the constant stream of #sponsored content on other platforms.

With this in mind, brands looking to establish a presence on Lemon8 can benefit from having a healthy mix of organic, user-generated, and promotional content to avoid fatiguing their audiences.

Is Lemon8 worth investing in?

As with any new platform, there are valid concerns over Lemon8’s longevity and whether it’s worth investing in.

Because Lemon8 is also owned by ByteDance, it could face the same scrutiny as TikTok over security concerns. With the future usage of ByteDance-owned apps in political limbo, if a TikTok ban were to occur, users in the U.S. could also be barred from Lemon8.

Also, while some social media platforms emerge with a splash, the excitement can quickly fade. In recent years, apps like Clubhouse and BeReal showed promising growth but failed to capture the attention of audiences long-term.

While it’s a good idea for marketers to have a basic level of understanding of new platforms that have captured the attention of audiences, only time will tell if Lemon8 is able to turn social media lemons into lemonade.

Elsewhere in Marketing

The latest marketing news and strategy insights.

Meta making money: In Q1, Meta reported a 3% earnings increase after three straight quarters of declining revenue.

Move over Twitter: Meta’s text-based app Barcelona is vying to be an alternative to the bird app.

For the AI-overwhelmed: Jasper’s VP of Marketing breaks down how to integrate AI into your marketing team’s workflow.

On trend: how marketers can use social media trends to get in front of new customers.

Speaking of trends… HubSpot just released the State of Social Media 2023, which features insights from over 1,000 social media marketers.

Moolah-la: the creator economy is expected to reach $500 billion by 2027.

Post Content

Artificial intelligence will change how businesses operate. At this point, that statement won’t surprise you.

In fact, AI’s impact on the workplace is already happening.

62% of business leaders have already invested in AI and automation tools for their employees, according to our State of Artificial Intelligence survey.

What’s more, 65% of survey respondents believe AI innovations will be comparable to the industrial revolution.

At its core, this means one big thing for the future of business: Marketing, sales, and service professionals now have more time to work on complex, higher-impact work. AI enables creativity and innovation to supersede tedious and redundant tasks.

Hours spent drafting professional emails, creating marketing reports, coding, and much more will be replaced by time spent on deeper work: work that better enables you to learn about your email readers, strategize based on pre-synthesized data, and plan stronger web or product experiences for your customers.

But how, specifically, will you see AI impact businesses in 2023? Here are just a few ways AI’s already changing the workplace, according to our State of AI survey of 1,350 U.S. professionals.

How AI Will Revolutionize the Future of Business, According to HubSpot’s CMO

1. AI will enable you to obsess over your customers.

At Inbound 2022, we discussed the crisis of disconnection facing businesses today. Many SMBs are trying to find new ways to connect with customers in a hybrid world and rely on cobbled-point solutions that don’t reliably connect their customer data in an efficient, streamlined way.

AI is one of the most compelling solutions to the crisis of disconnection when it comes to understanding our customers.

Business leaders agree. Our research found a whopping 63% of business professionals feel that AI already helps their employees understand their customers better.

AI can help you pull data from disparate sources into one single source of truth and glean unique insights about your customers that you otherwise might’ve missed.

But most importantly, it gives you the time to obsess over your customers again.

It gives your sales team time to genuinely connect with customers and work with them to identify how your products can solve for their unique needs.

It gives your support team the ability to focus on complex customer challenges rather than being bogged down by tickets that could be answered by a chatbot.

And it gives your leaders the insights they need to make more high-impact, powerful decisions that align with what matters most to your customers.

2. AI will automate data analysis for better decision-making.

One of the most time-consuming aspects of any leader’s job is wrangling the right data. It can take hours for a business leader, analyst, or marketer to analyze customer data and uncover meaningful insights, leaving less time to actually use it to make critical decisions. Not to mention, a manual data analysis process is inherently prone to human error.

Fortunately, predictive analytics — which uses machine learning algorithms, data mining, and statistical techniques to analyze large amounts of data and make powerful predictions about future trends or behaviors — can help streamline and supercharge your analytics processes.

There are three main benefits to leveraging AI for data analysis:

AI algorithms can discover patterns that might not be obvious to humans.
AI can learn from your data and improve its predictions over time.
You don’t have to do it yourself.

Smarter data ultimately means a more personalized customer experience. Truly understanding your customer data helps you improve how you engage with each individual prospect.

Additionally, predictive analytics can help each organization expand its reach. Sales leaders, for instance, can leverage AI-based insights to formulate reports, develop key account strategies, and build more powerful forecasts on their pipelines.

Among the leaders we surveyed, one-fourth reported the biggest benefit of AI is its ability to enable their employees to make better data-driven decisions.

My bet? The best leaders of the near future will see AI as an indispensable part of their reporting and analytics processes.

3. AI will reduce business costs and improve efficiency.

In today’s difficult economic climate, business leaders need to do more with less.

There are innumerable ways AI can help your business save money – 28% of business leaders have already found that AI helps their company cut costs.

For one, it will help automate time-consuming, manual tasks. For instance, many customer support reps need to spend extensive time responding to recurring questions from customers. By leveraging AI, you can automate responses to commonly asked questions, which frees up your support reps for more complex issues.

A full 91% of customer support reps who use AI say that chatbots already effectively respond to customer service requests.

Additionally, you can leverage AI for predictive maintenance. Run or work at a business that uses lots of equipment or machinery? AI can help businesses predict equipment failures so you can schedule maintenance before a breakdown, minimizing repair costs. Dealing with inventory issues? AI could help predict when or if inventory is running high or low to help prevent excess storage costs or other business waste.

Ultimately, AI will improve efficiencies across the business – all while enhancing the customer experience. On average, AI already saves the average employee 2.5 hours per day.

With all that extra time, your business and employees can scale a stronger human connection.

4. Business leaders will invest in new hires specifically trained in AI.

So the question on everyone’s mind is: Is AI going to steal my job?

The short answer: no. AI is more likely to optimize the impact of existing roles and create room for additional hiring opportunities.

On Google Trends, the term “prompt engineer” — which was practically non-existent at the start of 2023 — has risen rapidly, hitting peak popularity in early April.

Image Source

And our AI survey found that 66% of business leaders have already hired a new employee specifically to help with leveraging and implementing AI.

This number will only increase.

At HubSpot, we’ve created dedicated task forces across departments with the specific purpose of identifying how we should implement AI into our current processes across the organization.

Other businesses will do the same — either identifying internal employees who can focus on AI for their business, or hiring new AI experts or consultants to fill that need.

5. AI can help businesses detect fraud.

Another benefit of AI? It will make fraud detection easier for businesses of all sizes.

In 2022, 65% of businesses were victims of fraudulent attacks or attempts.

Fraud can be detrimental financially and legally for any business. Fraud is also increasingly challenging to detect as it becomes more sophisticated.

In 2023, businesses will increasingly leverage AI tools to detect and deter fraudulent activity. AI can point out anomalies in data, such as unusual spending behavior, which helps your employees identify potential fraudsters.

Additionally, AI can use data to make predictions on the likelihood that a particular transaction is fraudulent. Over time, AI algorithms will become better at detecting fraudulent activity, such as suspicious logins, odd transactions based on consumer behavior, or identity theft.

6. AI will help businesses build better products.

In the future, we’ll also begin to see business leaders leverage AI to uncover new product opportunities.

For instance, software engineers can use AI tools to sift through feedback, engagement, or other product usage data to determine which features they should improve on an existing product, or discover new product ideas based on gaps in their offerings.

But it goes beyond that. AI algorithms can also help you design your product.

Yep – you heard that right. AI will be able to analyze data on customer usage patterns, feedback, and preferences to provide you with invaluable insights necessary to create more user-friendly, engaging, effective products for your customers.

It will also help you speed up the product development process start-to-finish with rapid prototyping. AI algorithms can seamlessly and instantly provide different design options, so your team can quickly identify the most promising option and iterate in real-time.

Preparing for an Era of AI Disruption

AI is poised to disrupt virtually every industry. But it’s not something we need to fear.

The key to long-term growth and success is to evolve quickly with AI and accept it’s here to stay.

In the early stages of AI, you’ll want to remain focused on your highest priorities, and how your business can get the most out of AI. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can use AI on a tactical level, or get more original data in our State of AI Series, dive into our AI learning path, or download the offer below.

If you’ve been on social media lately, you know shopping has taken center stage on most platforms.

But, social commerce a controversial topic — some people love it, others are exhausted by product placements everywhere. And, in our latest research, we discovered that people don’t trust the social media apps they use daily to handle their purchases.

How Consumers Feel About Social Media Shopping

For starters, just 41% of social media users feel comfortable buying products directly on social apps, and only 37% trust platforms with their card info.

And when it comes to the products sold directly on social platforms, just 21% of social media users view them as high-quality.

Still, around one in five social media users buy on social media regularly, and 75% of those shoppers say they’re satisfied with their latest purchase.

So why are people so suspicious of social shopping? Let’s take a look at the biggest concerns consumers have with shopping on social, how you can address them, and which platforms are most trusted for shopping.

The Biggest Social Shopping Concerns

By far, the biggest concern of consumers is that companies selling products directly on social media aren’t legitimate or could be scamming customers.

As mentioned above, suspicions regarding the quality of the product and sharing card information with social platforms also play a huge role.

On top of that, one-third of social media users are concerned that their purchase will never be delivered, and the same amount worry about the item will not be as described when and if they do get it.

What Can Social Sellers Do to Build Trust?

1. Make and Stand By Customer Promises

First, directly address common consumer objections or concerns by promising and following through on guarantees like:

a set, transparent, and explainable shipping speed
Refunds and/or replacement warranties
Customer service availability (ideally on multiple channels)

While this step is a foundational standard that most businesses should follow, the promises above won’t be enough to gain full trust, especially if you’re a brand selling exclusively on social.

2. Build Community

The next step is to foster a trusting community with your audience.

You can do this by responding to their comments or questions, addressing concerns in review responses, and asking your community for feedback. You should also aim to build content strategies fueled with funny, relatable, and valuable posts that are relevant to your prospects andd show the humanity behind your brand, without making the content feel like an ad.

For example, if you sell peanut butter, make a poll on your story about crunchy vs. smooth to end the debate once and for all. Or create a short video chock-full of fun facts about peanuts: (Did you know astronaut Alan Shepard once brought a peanut to the moon and back?).

Encourage Customer Engagement and UGC

Time and time again, research has shown that word of mouth, recommendations from loved ones, and product reviews from trusted, or relatable, sources can drive consumers through their buyer’s journey. And, this makes sense: Are you more likely to trust a random website selling your a product, or a friend who already used that same item?

With this in mind, encourage happy customers to provide positive reviews or user-generated content to build social proof that your product is legitimate and customers are satisfied with it.

Similarly, try working with small influencers with niche, tight-knit communities related to your product – their stamp of approval can help bridge the trust gap.

Zone in on the Right Channels

When it comes to social selling you also have to consider the platform you’re using, because they aren’t all equally equipped for social commerce just yet, and different audiences are looking for different things.

For example, products you prioritize selling on Facebook, where the demographic skews older, might be different from products you’d sell on a Gen-Z-heavy platform like TikTok. Like content preferences, consumers also trust certain platforms to a different extent – especially when giving personal or credit card information.

Next, let’s take a look at the platform consumers trust most for shopping.

Most Trusted Social Shopping Platforms

Facebook has the most trusted social shopping platform, according to 38% of social users. YouTube comes in 2nd place (17%), followed by Instagram (14%).

Though not exactly the same as social shopping (where you buy directly in the app), it’s important to remember that people have been buying things through Facebook Marketplace for a while now, while shopping experiences on other platforms are much newer and have catching up to do. So, now, with Facebook Shops, it feels much more natural to start using your credit card to purchase items on a platform that’s already built robust shopping experiences with Marketplace.

One interesting thing to note is that Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta) have the same in-app shopping technology and platform, while one is adapted for Facebook, Instagram’s is adapted to Instagram features, Instagram business pages, and UX. However, Instagram has far less trust than Facebook.

Why could this be? We aren’t sure, but one guess could be the age, trust, and sheer size of Facebook – which Instagram could likely catch up to. It will be interesting to see if Instagram ultimately gains more shopping trust due to its growing age, credibility, and product purchasing features in the coming years. So

Channels with the Best Social Shopping Experience

We also asked social media users, which platform has the best in-app shopping experience, and Instagram (despite its lack in consumer trust) came out on top with 30% of the vote, followed by Facebook (29%), and TikTok (15%).

This makes sense as Instagram has been a leader in the social shopping space, though it seems users are somewhat skeptical of the quality of the products being sold on the app. While shopping features and product placements were a key part of Instagram’s cultural and UX evolution, platforms like Faccebook and YouTube started with a focus on content and user experience – and eventually worked shopping in.

What’s Next for Social Shopping?

The good news is social shopping is still evolving, so there’s plenty of time to build trust with social media users.

For more insights, check out our Social Media Trends Report or the full Consumer Trends Report.

And if you’re setting up shop on Instagram, head over to the Instagram Shopping Report for a deeper dive into selling on the app and which tools offer the best ROI.

Lastly, for overall coverage on the latest social media trends and tips from experts in the social marketing industry, download our full Social Media Report below.

Have you ever been hypnotized by social media? According to our recent Consumer Trends survey, users of it spend an average of three hours a day there.

It’s easy to fall into a social media trap, filled with endless distraction. One minute you’re checking a DM and the next thing you know you’ve spent an hour watching videos of corgis playing fetch.

But, it does make you wonder what consumers actually do while spending all that time on social media. And — as a marketer — you’re likely going a step further by asking: “What’s my target audience doing on there?”

Why Consumers Use (& Love) Social Media

Before asking social media users what the heck they’re doing on social media all day, we asked them to choose the top three reasons they log on in the first place.

And considering the average social media user spends three hours a day on their platforms of choice, it’s no surprise that they log on to do a bit of everything there:

In digging deeper, we determined the top three reasons users log on to each major social media platform:

While Facebook and Instagram are mainly used to share content from our lives and keep up with family, users turn to TikTok and YouTube for entertainment, education, and inspiration. We also have Twitter and LinkedIn, the only platforms that are primarily used to keep up with news and trends.

With that in mind, we can dive a little deeper into the top reasons people use each of these platforms.

What Social Media Users Do on Each Platform

Facebook users primarily keep up with loved ones — but also like to share media on their feeds.

Facebook — used by 69% of U.S. adults is the most popular social media app on our list.

Two in three Facebook users are on it to keep up with friends and family, 43% use it to share pictures and videos, and 26% go to Facebook simply for entertainment. About one in five lean on Facebook for news or trends, as well as to learn new things.

YouTube users seek out entertainment, education, and inspirational content.

YouTube is the second most popular social media platform, used by 57% of U.S. adults. Edutainment thrives on YouTube – the top reasons people visit are to find entertaining content, learn new things, find inspiration, and keep up with news and trends. About one in five YouTubers use the app to keep up with brands and products.

Instagrammers share multimedia content while keeping up with friends, family, and celebrities.

45% of American adults use Instagram, and the top uses are to share pictures/videos (38%), to keep up with friends and family (33%), follow celebrities and influencers (27%), find entertaining content (27%), and keep up with brands/products (24%).

TikTok users watch a mix of entertaining, educational, and inspirational content.

Just about one in three U.S. adults are on TikTok, but this shoots up to 62% when we look at Gen Z.

Overall, TikTok’s used much like YouTube – for entertainment, education, and inspiration. 23% use TikTok to keep up with celebs/influencers and 21% use it to share their own content. About one in five TikTokers go to the platform to follow brands/products, while the same amount use it to keep up with news and trends.

Twitter users crave news, entertainment, and celebrity content.

Twitter stands out as the only platform where keeping up with news and cultural trends is the #1 reason people use the app. Finding entertaining content (27%), keeping up with celebrities (26%), and learning new things (23%) are also top reasons for Twitter usage.

LinkedIn users surf feeds for education, industry news, and brand updates.

As the only social media platform on this list geared towards professionals, it’s no surprise that the top reason people use LinkedIn is to learn new things. About 1 in 4 LinkedIn users also log on to keep up with news or trends, brands and their products, and their network of friends and family.

More Social Media Trends

Looking for more social trends? Check out HubSpot’s Social Media Trends 2023 Report blog pos, or the full PDF version below. In this content, we dig into data from 1,200+ social media marketers as well as key insights comparing marketer data to our bi-annual Consumer Trends Report.