TikTok is still "experienced", Byte Lemon8 entered the top 10 in the US list again

 TikTok is still "experienced", Byte Lemon8 entered the top 10 in the US list again

On March 24, 2023, Zhou was funded to attend a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and accepted questions about a series of TikTok issues.

On March 28, 2023, Lemon8, a lifestyle community under ByteDance, entered the Top 10 list of the US App Store downloads.

Within a week, Bytedance twice aroused heated discussions among American investors, entrepreneurs and ordinary users. And this time Lemon8's listing is more like a silent protest against the ban discussion to some extent.

In fact, as a lifestyle community application, Lemon8 is not a newcomer. As the first platform in China to pay attention to Lemon8 going overseas, we witnessed the launch of Sharee, changed its name to Lemon8 and made efforts in Japan and Thailand, and Lemon8 grew into the largest lifestyle sharing community in Japan and Southeast Asia. Certain results.

From the official launch of Sharee in Japan on March 12, 2020, to the Top 10 free list in the United States on March 28, 2023, it took three years for ByteDance to incubate a product with an MAU of 4 million+. This is no accident.

Although I have already talked about why Lemon8 can succeed in many articles, today I will summarize several key strategies for Lemon8 to grow rapidly. Judging from the results, it can basically be divided into four steps: product positioning, market selection, marketing growth, and creator system construction. What's interesting is that in many cases, Lemon8 will choose to walk on four legs together.

From video to text, Lemon8 aims to grow grass

Indeed, ByteDance is one of the overseas companies with the most experience in China's globalization, and TikTok is also a rare pan-entertainment application that has truly entered the global mainstream market.

But before the launch of Lemon8, ByteDance's successful experience was still mainly focused on short videos such as TikTok and Helo (a local language short video platform created by ByteDance for Indian users). Looks like apart from the "globalization" experience, there aren't many similarities to the current Lemon8.

From another perspective, popular projects in 2020, such as Perfect Diary, Bubble Mart, Vitality Forest, and Three and a Half Meals, all use Xiaohongshu as the main battlefield for brand marketing. At that time, David, an operator of a Chinese local beauty brand, once revealed to the author that "more than half of our traffic comes from Xiaohongshu, and as far as I know, this is the case for many of our peers."

Although this situation was related to the relatively optimistic expansion period of the entire brand at that time, to some extent, it did reflect the attributes of Xiaohongshu's "national grass planting machine". As the ecology matures, Xiaohongshu gradually becomes Users' browsers, Dianping, Douban, Zhihu, beauty makeup, and users who encounter clothing, home furnishing, and food-related questions will all find answers on Xiaohongshu.

Xiaohongshu and Douyin/TikTok seem to be on two completely different tracks, but in fact the target customers and target users of the two platforms are highly overlapped.

Perhaps seeing the potential of the Xiaohongshu model, or perhaps seeing the opportunities in overseas markets, ByteDance made two attempts.

One is that during the bimonthly September-October 2021, Douyin started the "L Special" action to seize the core user group of Xiaohongshu. The Douyin platform is trying to "plant grass" and discover more creators who are willing to publish content on Douyin. For more specific content, please read the author's previous article "Developing Lemon8, Breeding Xiaohongshu in Douyin" , Byte Heart to Graphics".

The other is the launch of Sharee in Japan in March 2020 for a grass planting platform attempt, and officially renamed Sharee to Lemon8 in September 2021. Lemon8 defines this name change as "rebirth" in the description of the app store , and it also starts from here Lemon's market ambitions are increasingly evident.

At that time, the main directions of Lemon8 were beauty makeup, clothing, home furnishing and store exploration, which were similar to the main directions of Xiaohongshu.

However, in the later exploration and development process, the tonality of "lifestyle" became more and more obvious, and even made different center of gravity adjustments in different markets. And later also intends to develop some creators of outdoor sports and artistic expression, so that the positioning of lifestyle is more prominent.

Gabrielle Victor, the creator with 430,000 fans on TikTok, defines Lemon8 as "the child of Pinterest and Instagram".

Japan, Southeast Asia, and then to Europe and the United States, the global territory spread out

The first step of Lemon8's globalization is Japan.

Judging from the nutrients required by a collective grass planting platform, Japan is undoubtedly the soil suitable for the growth of Lemon8.

First of all, Japan's beauty, clothing and home furnishing industries are very developed. Among the world's top 5 cosmetics groups, only "Shiseido" is an Asian company from Japan. The Cosme Awards have always attracted the attention of global beauty lovers and make-up media. Uniqlo, Local Japanese clothing brands such as Moussy and Issey Miyake are also well-known in the world. In addition, there are many local cosmetics brands and clothing brands in Japan with a long history. The development of the industry allows users to quickly meet new needs when they discover them. A Japanese student studying abroad revealed to the author that " It is difficult to find Japanese girls who do not wear makeup or dress up in Japan." Although it has a certain personal perspective, it reflects the exquisite culture of Japan to a certain extent.

In addition, Japan has always had a grass-growing culture and a grass-growing community. There are almost dedicated communities for food, clothing, beauty, and home furnishing, but most of them are concentrated in a certain field, and there is no integrated grass-growing similar to Xiaohongshu. Community. In addition, there was an interesting phenomenon at that time that "many Japanese users had the habit of using Xiaohongshu" , but Xiaohongshu did not make targeted attempts at the Japanese market at that time, and even though there were products under Xiaohongshu Launched, but a far cry from Xiaohongshu itself. There is both the habit of planting grass and market gaps. This is also an opportunity for Lemon8, and it can even be said to be a limited opportunity.

Another reason that cannot be ignored is the reputation that ByteDance has accumulated in Japan through products such as TikTok and Buzzvideo. Compared with other markets in the world, Japan's barriers to trust and localization are relatively high, and it is relatively difficult for users to accept overseas products. However, TikTok and even ByteDance's attempts in the Japanese market have established a certain sense of trust. The author was very impressed. When Sharee was first launched, a Japanese user commented in Japanese in the app store, "I heard that it is a product of the same company as TikTok, so I look forward to it."

In addition to reputation itself, TikTok’s accumulated creator system construction method and accumulated creator resources are also important factors for startup.

After achieving certain results in the Japanese market, Lemon8 embarked on a journey in Southeast Asia, and chose Thailand as the first stop in Southeast Asia.

The situation in Thailand is basically similar to that of Japan. It has a well-established beauty makeup, clothing, hairdressing and nail art industry. Sally, who has settled in Thailand for a long time, told the author, "Thai girls love makeup very much, and they basically have to make up when they go out. Due to their economic level, they Most of them will choose local cosmetics brands in Thailand, which is convenient for buying more, changing and trying more, and there are also many beauty collection stores in Thailand, which is convenient for girls to buy in one stop.” In addition, Thailand's Internet celebrity industry is also very developed, so it also has better content supply support.

After gaining a firm foothold in the Thai market, Lemon8 has further expanded its market to Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets. However, no matter which market it goes to, Lemon8 will recruit a local team locally. Content operations and marketing managers are basically required positions. It is one of ByteDance's common strategies to hand over the task of docking to local employees.

In March 2023, Lemon8 chose to enter the US and UK markets, which also shows Lemon8's global ambitions, and this summit also shows ByteDance's determination to win the European and American markets to some extent.

Attract users, make good use of social media, and build a creator system

In addition to products meeting user needs, how to more efficiently acquire more high-quality users and more high-quality creators is also a problem that platform-based communities must solve. Lemon8 has adopted three major methods: advertising, making good use of social media, and creator incentives.

On the advertising side, although TikTok has not fully reused the miraculous growth method of TikTok, according to the statistics of the majority of large platforms, Lemon8 will indeed increase the advertising budget at some specific time points, and this amount is already higher than that of other community-based platforms. It is an order of magnitude difference. In the past 365 days, Lemon8 has delivered a total of 550,000 creatives, and there are still as many as 55,000 creatives after strict de-duplication.

Based on Lemon8's advertising materials and app store downloads in the past three years, it can be basically concluded that advertising and marketing have played an important role in the growth of Lemon8.

 

Judging from the advertising materials launched in the past year, OOTD, lifestyle, winter, fashion, beauty, generation, fashion, and cultivation are the high-frequency words of Lemon8's external marketing. Commonly used materials are Thai, English, Japanese, Indonesian and Vietnamese.

Additionally, Lemon8 is actively leveraging Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok for growth. At present, videos related to Lemon8 have received more than 2.3 billion views on TikTok, and what is interesting is that the views of Lemon8-related videos released by many creators are usually more than other videos posted on the homepage, or even several times that of other videos. video.

Although the current #Lemon8 topic videos are mainly from non-English-speaking regions, it is true that more American creators have started to update Lemon8 related recommendations recently.

What's more interesting is that Lemon8 operates in a multi-matrix manner on the three social media, especially the three major markets of Japan, Indonesia and Thailand, which have basically been certified by official media.

 

At present, Lemon8 official media has more than 700,000 followers on the three major social media. Judging from the frequency of content updates and the number of fans, Instagram should be the main media channel chosen by Lemon8. Judging from the content of posts, Lemon8 mainly releases and recommends creators , Recommended popular content and promotional activities. The significance of the platform’s official recommendation of creators in terms of creator incentives has been verified by Instagram many years ago, so Lemon8 not only recommends users on the site, but also further exposes creators and content through off-site recommendations.

In addition, Lemon8 also organizes offline meetups for creators in Japan, the United Kingdom, Southeast Asia and other regions to deepen the relationship between creators and the platform and encourage interaction between creators. Judging from the follow-up video feedback of creators, offline activities It did play a positive role.

In addition, Lemon8 also encourages high-quality bloggers to publish articles through direct cash rewards, allowing more vertical bloggers to settle on the platform. For specific publishing requirements, please refer to "European and American Graphic Markets, Meta and Byte Contest".

Whether Lemon8 can take on the important task of ByteDance’s globalization PlanB remains to be seen, but Lemon8 has achieved such results in 3 years, which has shown to some extent that ByteDance’s accumulated globalization experience and methods are indeed There is a certain degree of reproducibility. But in the final analysis, we still need to believe in and implement localization, improve products according to user needs, respect and motivate creators, and appropriate growth strategies.