Dive into the dynamic world of social commerce with Matt Navarra, where seismic shifts and emerging trends are reshaping the landscape in 2024. From the rise of private communities to TikTok's foray into Live Shopping, Matt unveils pivotal developments impacting brands.
Discover actionable insights on leveraging user-generated content, authenticity, and AI-powered personalization to thrive in the digital marketplace. Tune in for exclusive predictions on the future of social media and commerce, and equip yourself with strategies to stay ahead of the curve.
Seismic shifts and emerging trends are reshaping the Social Commerce landscape in 2024.
Join Paul & Verity LIVE, from the Social Commerce Summit: London 2024, as they dive deep into this ever-evolving world with Matt Navarra; renowned social media consultant and industry expert. Reflecting on the key moments from 2023, Matt delves into the rise of private communities as the new frontier for content, sharing, and engagement.
From Meta's strategic pivots to TikTok's ambitious foray into Live Shopping, Matt breaks down the developments that will continue to impact brands in the coming year.
Discover the crucial trends brands must leverage to navigate the touchpoints of technology, consumer culture, and Social Commerce successfully. From the growing importance of user-generated content (UGC) to the power of authenticity in creator-led brand marketing, there’s plenty of actionable insights for brands looking to thrive in the digital marketplace.
Explore what lies ahead for the key platforms, including TikTok, Snapchat, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), and YouTube, as they race to innovate and capture the attention of billions of social users worldwide. From augmented reality (AR) integration to exclusive predictions on the future of the social media and commerce crossroads, you’ll hear the roadmap for success over the next 3-5 years.
Don't miss this insightful conversation; one that equips brand builders with the knowledge and strategies needed to thrive in the dynamic world of social commerce.
Rate & review Building Brand Advocacy:
Connect with Matt:
Building Brand Advocacy 053:
The Social Commerce Landscape: Matt Navarra's expert Insights on Trends, Platforms and Strategies
VERITY: Welcome Matt, I mean I am a big part of your community and have been for a few years now. I mean anyone sort of in the social media landscape industry, if you're not part of Matt's community then I don't know what's wrong with you because your WhatsApp is popping off every few minutes with breaking news. But for anyone that doesn't know you, do you wanna just introduce yourself?
MATT: Yeah sure, so I am a freelance social media consultant now so I work with brands from Google and Meta and TikTok through to startups in tech and social as well. I write a weekly newsletter on a Friday, Geekout, which is kind of literally, is unapologetically long. It's the longest email you'll ever get and has every single thing that has been talked about social media in that particular week. I also have a private community called Geekout as well on WhatsApp, which gives you instant alerts to every single thing that's going on in social that's worth knowing about. Speak at events, do TV stuff. Don't watch Channel 5 on Friday. I've just been told I did a documentary and they've said it's coming out on Friday at nine o'clock on Channel 5 about the Nicola Bully story and the TikTok phenomenon that went around it. So you'll see my face pick up. I'm gonna cringe behind the sofa. That's kind of what I do across the week.
VERITY: Amazing. I mean, I don't wanna dwell on 2023 too much, but obviously a lot of stuff happened in the social media, social commerce, landscape. What do you think are the key moments that happened last year that potentially will be following through into 2024?
MATT: There's so much to pick from in terms of what's gone on and things, but trying to kind of hone it down slightly into the commerce piece. But I think one of the broader themes has been the shift towards kind of private communities and private social. And I think what you would have noticed with particularly Meta and Instagram and the platforms there is that a lot of the new features that they brought out are kind of tied into creators especially, but also in terms of private sharing and community and collaborative kind of features. So you've seen like Instagram notes and you've seen they've got a feature they've tested at the moment called Flipside. We have a private profile, second profile that you can have. And I think Adam Mosseri was saying in a podcast last year that kind of all of the growth they've seen in the last few years on Instagram has been through sharing and direct messaging in private communities. And then any growth that they've seen in feed has all been video content, which probably isn't a surprise, but it shows you where a lot of the sharing's going on. And then people, I think there was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently saying kind of like, people aren't sharing on social as much anymore. And Adam quite rightly pointed out, it's not that they're not sharing as much, it's they're sharing differently, and they're sharing in different places, in different spaces. And so when you're talking about whether it's commerce or any other aspect of social, focusing on how do we engage and build communities ourselves and how do we get our content into these private spaces is a bigger, more important thing to be considering. So I think that as a more broad theme has been quite interesting. I think the other thing in terms of just dotting around some of the platforms, interestingly, Meta has kind of stepped back somewhat from the commerce piece in some ways because it kind of pulled away the shop tab on Instagram. It's kind of moved away from doing a lot of the Instagram live kind of push it was doing with creators. It's pushing people to use their own payment platforms more and it's focusing a lot around, like I say, private sharing and in creators in general. The platform where there's been the hugest, biggest, most talked about stuff with commerce has been TikTok. And so with TikTok, even in the last two, three days, there's been all sorts of stuff that they've announced, but essentially TikTok shops is the new Instagram reels in the sense that, can you remember when you went into Facebook or Instagram a few years ago, and literally any surface they could put a reel in front of you, it was there. There was no escaping it.
Well,TikTok's now slightly becoming much the same, but with shops and actually there was a piece recently about the fact that people have realized they can game the TikTok algorithm by linking to a shop item or having a shop because it will algorithmically boost content. And there was an experiment a guy did and he got a used pencil. This was like two weeks ago, a week ago. And he linked to that in his post and it just kind of took off because it's just so algorithmically boosted because they want shops to be everywhere. The backlash against shops is starting to happen. And so we're gonna see interestingly how that plays out given that their biggest push is gonna be around the shops piece. So that's been a significant factor. And this week, you know, and talking about TikTok Live is another aspect is they announced yesterday that they're building a live studio in LA for creators and for brands where you'd be able to, creators would be able to pay to use the live studio a fee for doing so, brands will be able to supply products to the studio and it'll be like a new, like you were saying, the new is old, old is new, kind of QVC is back because they kind of like people can go into the studio and brands will be able to work with different creators and the facilities and the logistics will be much more handled by TikTok and you'll probably start seeing in fact successful for them, lots more like it already is in China, these kind of warehouses of TikTok live operations that are are setting up. But TikTok is really pushing hard on the shops side of things and on live in general. I'm, you know, we're yet to really see live shopping take off in quite the same way that we've seen in the US, but this is the year that, you know, I think that we're gonna see a lot more of that kind of activity happen, but I'm gonna pause for breath because I know I'm talking a lot there. But there's, I know there's lots of points we've talked about before and you might wanna pick into.
PAUL: You said Instagram's been pulling back. I mean, they kind of were in the market, in the Western market before TikTok when it came to this, and they're now not doing it. Do you think there's a reason? Obviously, TikTok's pushing it, but are people actually consuming it? Do they want that in their life?
MATT: People wanting to shop via a live channel? I'm personally not convinced at the moment, not saying never, but at the moment, that markets like the UK, the US, Europe, and things are excited by the idea of shopping in a QVC live shopping kind of style, although it isn't quite as kind of dated as looking as that. I think the experience of live shopping is not really gaining the traction. Maybe they first thought and it was, you know, they've been trying it for a couple of years. They had a big operation in the UK trying to push shops and live activity for TikTok. This is, and you know, they had to sort of step back slightly. I think Instagram and one of the things they've done over the last few years is actually to try and slim down Instagram, become this big bloated app full of features and functionalities and what they've tried to do is kind of figure out what are our focuses and their focus is clearly and they've said as much is you know things like creators, it's anything to do with creators in general which does link into the commerce piece as well. It's all about sort of private sharing as I was mentioning earlier and also increasingly it's about AI and one of the things that we're going to see later on this year increasingly on most of the social platforms is AI assistance. You've already got that experience in Snapchat with My AI, but the ability to go into Instagram and have a assistant bot in there, and you can say, what are the best places on Instagram to buy such and such? What are the things that most people are talking about? Which shops are getting the most reviews? You can start to see it from the commerce side, how that assistant bot could be quite useful in terms of discovery of content, but discovery of products and services. So I think for Instagram, that kind of pulling away slightly from live and from the shop pieces, that I think that will come through the work they're doing with creators and building out that creator area. But in terms of all of the other things they're trying to do and focus on for Instagram and for Meta in general, I think live felt probably like more of a distraction and it wasn't adding much to the bottom line at this time. But I suspect that will change if TikTok shops and TikTok live proves to be as successful as it's likely to be.
VERITY: I feel like we're going to say TikTok a lot today.
MATT: Yeah, there's a lot of TikTok in here. Absolutely.
VERITY: Obviously, you just started to touch on some of the things that we're going to be seeing this year. I mean, obviously, Paul has just talked about the impact of social commerce. And I think 2024 is going to see a big shift in sort of more immersive, more individualized journeys. What do brands need to tap into to sort of like help them with this fusion of technology, social media, shopping? Like what are some of the areas that you see happening?
MATT: I think, as I was saying, that whole piece around private, social and communities and actually either creating and nurturing your own community around your brand and brand advocates, as well as the creators that you're working with as well. I think that has become increasingly important. We have to look at some of the kind of more viral examples of like Stanley Cup in recent weeks in terms of how they've leveraged that and how McDonald's, last year with Grimace Shakes and all of the stuff that they did, engaging the community in terms of kind of Frankenstein menu options of making it up. All of that kind of engagement strategy stuff is really important, particularly if you kind of want people to be carrying your message through into these private spaces and taking the content and the news and information that you have about your products and that into those private areas. I think the other aspect is that I've noticed with a lot of the brands that I've worked with that increasingly is hiring creators to work on a consultancy basis and having creators come into the companies themselves and actually help them be more creator led in terms of their content strategy. And it still surprises me the number of companies, big and small, that don't really have much of a strategy when it comes to using creators. And a lot of them at the same time also say, TikTok's really complicated and we don't know how to, we're gonna look really stupid and not very cool on TikTok because we don't have to use a creator. That's what they're there for. So I think a lot of that will become increasingly easier to do and people have more confidence in doing that and it will be ever more important to do that. I think also that user generated content, it's again, it's not a new phenomenon, but in terms of the importance of it and the value of it, it has increased exponentially in the last couple of years. And actually Instagram launched a feature earlier last year, I remember, where you can enable brands to be able to find user generated content and then start requesting the ability to tag a product and then link it to their activity on Instagram, which shows, you know, they've built a whole functionality and kind of collaboration, collaborative tools to be able to do that. It shows how important it is to brands, but also how much value they place on it as a business going forward. So I think those are some important factors. I think that in terms of Shops and TikTok, I think that brands need to be careful when they're putting stuff up on TikTok shops, that what they're putting up there is again, is thought out like they're producing content and not only entertains, but is also thinking like a creator. Like one of the things I found myself saying last year was telling brands to act and behave and put out content as if you were a creator. And rather than thinking about selling, you know, the old style ads, which were kind of this glossy makeup out with somebody kind of, it's now somebody who's 17 or 25 or whatever, man, woman kind of doing makeup or using the products and kind of more authentic. And although that's the most annoying word of last year, I think the buzzword I heard more than any else, you have to be authentic, you know, kind of like, oh, it started to grate after, but you know, the reason why some of these creator led brands have been so successful is at the heart of it is trust, ability to be relatable, it entertains, and also that it's a two-way thing rather than it's just a brand pumping out stuff. And creators have that level of kind of audience authenticity that really thrives. And so we've seen the likes of Kylie and we've seen the likes of, you know, Skims and Feastables by Mr. Beast and you know, the list goes on. So I think there'll be much more of that sort of activity and brands can do this themselves and nurture some of this stuff. And if you think about the idea of like, your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room, right? It's your reputation. You can't really control that. Ironically, one of the kind of the guardians of brand of the people who are trying to control the brand aesthetic and relinquishing that to creators, giving up that control to UGC, having a bit more lo-fi is one of the biggest battles that brands have, and probably a lot of people in this room will have there as they kind of collide there.
PAUL: How do you recommend brands can kind of get around that to sort of show that this is the way that the world is going?
MATT: Well, it's like any social media manager comes to me and sort of says, how do I convince my boss to allow me to do this kind of a bit more zany thing on TikTok, they just want us to put out a PDF as a flyer or something. I mean, I think a lot of it is by demonstrating what others are doing in the industry and showing how it's working. There's nothing that gets a fire under the sort of executives by saying, look at our biggest rival and what they've done, how successful it is. We're not even anywhere near this kind of thing. So I think that's part of it.
I think some of it within limits is, do you mind if I swear just do it because a lot of the stuff when I worked in government was that, you know, unless you kind of start experimenting slightly under the table in a sort of low risk way and experimenting with things or exploring some of these ideas and working up some of these ideas, even if they don't get executed, then a lot of them will never get off the ground. So I think that that's part of it as well.
And then giving them, give whoever your bosses, leaders are, kind of like small kind of tiptoe step ways to kind of test the waters so that their confidence is grown and try and find, rather than you've probably got lots of ideas you could do, find the one that you think this is gonna have the most chance of success if it was a low risk thing that we did so that you can demonstrate that success. So I think that that's part of it as well. And also just giving them some examples of content that you've done that's been closer to what you were trying to do more of and showing the differentials between it if you've got any kind of stats and insights on that as well.
VERITY: Great. Should we dig into some of the platforms for 2024?
MATT: Sure, yeah, absolutely. So... what would we like to start with? Well, I think, you know, as we were talking about for TikTok, one of the things that they actually announced, or I don't know if they announced it actually, I think someone leaked it, wasn't me. They have got the feature they're testing on shops where every post, every video will become a shoppable post if the experiment is expanded, where AI will detect every video, what's in that video, if there's what products, what brands, what places and things, and then if it can match that to a product or a retailer in the TikTok shops platform, it will on that post add potentially a link.
So you say, you wanna shop this look, you wanna buy this thing. So then it's not a case of what posts have been put out by a TikTok shop or what posts have been put out in a paid for way, every post becomes shoppable. Now you can see that I could also backfire massively on them if it becomes really tedious to see that all the time. So I think... We'll see a lot more of that. And last year, actually, we did see many of the platforms launch lots of shoppable things like YouTube added so when you have timestamps, you can tag a product on a specific timestamp on YouTube. And you've had similar tagging things for some time on Instagram and Meta products and things. So I think we'll see a lot more of that activity. I think the other bit that we can just scroll through to the other points I've got here, it wouldn't surprise me that we also see like a TikTok Shop day. You know, we've got Amazon Prime day, and it's like a big marketing event. It would not surprise me at all to see TikTok Shops day become something that they tried to make happen. And so a large aspect of the problem with Shops is and with all of this commerce stuff is trust. Because if you look at any of the surveys and research that's out there, the biggest thing that consumers tend to say about what is their hesitation in buying or searching for products on platforms, and then actually going through and purchasing it is trust in the platform, trust in social and trust that the product's not counterfeit and things. So finding ways to get people to, with discounts and deals and things, to experiment with that is gonna be another significant thing that we'll see more of next year. I think the other thing in terms of the, touch quickly on AR and VR stuff, I still think we are three, five years away from seeing any meaningful shift in terms of people who work like yourselves, working in companies, thinking about content and thinking about platforms and distribution that becomes a significant factor. I think I saw something this morning that said that actually Meta's sort of expecting its first real flagship AR kind of glasses product beyond the ones they've got now with the Ray-Bans to not hit the market till probably 2027. The Metaverse kind of stuff is really something that's more probably into next to next decade than it is in this decade. And I think what we will see this year is a lot more talk about AR and VR and mixed reality, especially because Apple's vision device is launching. If you've got, anyone got two and a half, was it $3,500 to spend on a device? So we'll see some of that, but I don't think it will be as significant, certainly not this year. I think in terms of the stuff to do with, we'll quickly touch on Elon Musk's X. We'll move on from that because there's not much else to say about that. Every brand that comes to me, I just say, just pull back. I wouldn't get too excited about it. Then to be honest, X in general, it's always been a small percentage of most people's budgets anyways for advertising. It's still very much a brand building exercise and having a presence for kind of what's going on in real time sort of stuff. But in terms of like, you know... power marketing, advertising and conversions and shopping and things. It's just not that sort of platform. And although they've got some features that allow you to have carousels and bits and pieces, it's not something that I would imagine is going to shift a great deal in the next year. And actually the risk to your brand is probably greater than any benefit you'll get from using it.
PAUL: There'll be some bargains to be had though. You might be able to get some really cheap stuff.
MATT: Anyone want any crypto? There's loads of crypto on there. There's all sorts of other trash on there. In terms of like Snapchat, Snapchat's an interesting one because obviously it skews for a lot of brands is the audience they desperately want to hear. Well, I can't remember what the stat was, I was, I'm sorry, 80, 90% of demographic teens and Gen Z use Snapchat on a daily basis. It's phenomenal the amount of reach they have for that age group. But a lot of what they've done in the last year and what they will continue to do from what they're saying is going to be focused around again, more of this, they kind of seem to have made their position as being the AR kind of an app and the try on, try on makeup, try on clothes, use lenses, use filters. I think we'll see a lot more of the exploitation of the Snap Map and being able to kind of tag things within that, being able to kind of search for things in there and there being much more activations that are centered around the snap map, but also in terms of AR filters that are shoppable. Because everything, like I said earlier, is becoming a shoppable lens, a shoppable YouTube video, a shoppable TikTok post. So I think that for them it will be a lot to do with that. I think... interestingly on a customer service side of things, like WhatsApp is also now trying to make money. It's never made any money for Meta. And so they're already experimenting in, I think it's in Latin America, that they've got payment systems set up, business cataloging functions and features as well. But I think for most brands, the main use case for WhatsApp will be customer service and messaging. And the last few years, there's been quite a big explosion in the number of brands that are actually using WhatsApp as a communications channel.
And then AI built into that, whether it's through WhatsApp running out, actually having a meaningful, useful conversation with a chat bot that isn't just kind of the robotic structured answers. And if you say something that says, sorry, I'll cut you up to an agent, will now become less of a thing. So scaling customer service with a brand voice, because a lot of the AI now can actually replicate pretty much anything you want it to. I did an experiment last year, I recorded one minute of my voice using 11 Labs, which is a startup. And then I did a recording of the same sentence on using AI and then the same sentence when I did it. And most people thought the AI was me. Because I don't know how that says about me, but in terms of being convincing and being useful, you can start to imagine how you can employ AI, whether it's in chatbots or whether it's in production of ad assets. So a lot of the Meta's advantage program has been really geared around helping marketers and advertisers produce ad sets and targeting in a much more sophisticated way. But there's a whole list of other things I know I put in there, so I'm happy to touch on more other things as well.
VERITY: I was just gonna say, I actually cloned Paul's voice using the same tool, which was quite dangerous to use across the office, but yeah.
PAUL: Actually, on that, I had to then call my parents and then tell them that if anyone wanted to try and con them out of money and said they were me and I was desperate and they're on the phone and they sounded like me, they've gotta know that there's a problem. Because after I heard that I was like panicked. It's quite scary actually.
MATT: We should all do that. Safe word.
PAUL: Safe word, yeah, good idea. That's a good idea.
VERITY: I would quickly like to, I know YouTube is quite a up and coming, not up and coming, but I think it's a channel that many brands are sort of considering. It might be worth just touching on that for a couple of minutes.
MATT: Yeah, so again, a lot of the platforms, certainly the video-led platforms have kind of followed a similar route. And so a lot of what I would say about YouTube has been similar to what I would have said about TikTok. So... They have Shorts, although Shorts has not been quite as phenomenally successful as TikTok was. It's still the power three of Shorts, Reels, and TikTok. It's there. But a lot of people use Shorts as a gateway drug. I was gonna say that. Gateway drug into their longer form content, into their lives, into their other stuff. So Shorts is quite a powerful tool from that point of view. I think for brands, but also particularly for creators, it's particularly seen as the kind of gold standard in terms of creator monetization and making a home for their video content because the consistency and the lack of volatility in creator payments and the amount that they get is far greater, far better on YouTube. So I think they'll keep on reinforcing that.
And I think one of the criticisms has been of TikTok over the years has been the fact that you can become TikTok famous for doing all sorts of things. And that once you get that kind of notoriety on TikTok, the actual connection and the closeness you have with your audience is quite tricky because people don't explore TikTok in the same way as you explore YouTube. You go to YouTube, you might go to someone's channel and you look at lots of their videos, but most people just click through the feed on TikTok. And so for creators and therefore that will at some point lead into their kind of relationships with brands who wanna work with them, the relationship they have is better formed and better managed through and building up their presence on YouTube. But certainly YouTube, you know, YouTube Live, Shorts, shoppable posts, I'm thinking to see a lot more AI tools, a lot similar to all the ones you've seen on other platforms where editing and creating advertising content, also created content using AI will be a big part of probably this year. They actually announced yesterday in their earnings call that they were quite vague, unfortunately, but they also said, tools to the market, which is what they all say anyway, but I certainly expect us to see possibly more AI assistance with them as well. And the live piece, you know, I think it will follow a very similar track, to be honest. I think that the interesting battle is gonna be on two fronts, it's gonna be the battle for creators, which has been going on for the last couple of years between the main platforms, and the battles for shop, commerce and shopping. And most of that goes hand in hand because you kind of need creators for that piece as much as you need the kind of infrastructure around the shopping piece. One thing I was gonna say is that one of the battles that we were thinking was gonna play out last year was around kind of like Amazon, kind of like the disruptor in all of this kind of piece because they're the e-commerce giant and kind of... own that space, dominate that space, but they're desperately aware of the kind of rising tide of social commerce and how that impacts them. And there was a big question of, you know, what's going to happen last year? Was it going to be that, will it be easier for TikTok to become more like Amazon or it would be easier for Amazon to become more like a TikTok? And my bet was on it was TikTok will become easier for them to build an e-commerce business than the other way around. And actually Amazon did try to kind of build its own kind of influence or video channel and it all was pretty awful. I think they're still paying pretty poor amounts of money. Sorry for standing for Amazon in the room. I think they were asking someone the other day that they wanted them to produce some like 200 photos, pieces of content and they would pay them something like $500 or something. And I was just thinking, this is definitely not market rates right now. So they they're desperately trying. But what they what's been interesting is they Amazon's made deals with Snapchat, Meta, Instagram, Facebook to have shoppable Amazon posts. And that's going to be their seemingly that entry route into the social commerce space. And it also kind of solves a little bit of the challenge for Meta, kind of backed away from having its own shops and stuff by tying in with what people are already doing, which is look around on social and go, and then I buy it on Amazon, because that's where it's cheaper and easy to buy it. Whereas TikTok have gone, f you, we're gonna do it ourselves. So this is what, so they've decided that they are gonna build out their own, they've given creators and brands all of the logistics and infrastructure if they wanna do TikTok shops, but they don't wanna do all of that kind of delivery and all that stuff, TikTok will do it for a fee. The live studios, they're building the live studios for creators and things. So there's a TikTok versus Amazon and then Amazon at the same time is kind of making friends and doing business deals with Meta, Instagram and Snapchat. So it's going to be an interesting space to see how that plays out.
PAUL: So that's fascinating because there's that, you know, TikTok obviously don't want people to leave, you know, the digital fentanyl. Yeah, they're going to, they don't want to kick it as soon as they get out of that stream. And, you know, so they want to keep people on the app. Meta and YouTube are actually happy for them to do that with Amazon?
MATT: Yeah, to some degree, I think so. And I'm curious to see how much that tension rises, because as TikTok Shops becomes more popular and the behavior of people going to TikTok, researching products and finding things they like from creators and then going and now I'll buy it on Amazon because they actually did campaign wasn't in the last year or two where it was hashtag buy it on Amazon and ticked off by whatever. And then they created a whole space on Amazon for people who were just doing exactly that. But it's going to come a point when TikTok Shops has got to a sufficient level where they don't really want or need the Amazon bit and they would rather not. So that tension between those two is going to be it's going to get spicier as the year goes on I think. But it depends how quickly shops success kind of rises.
PAUL: And actually Snapchat I guess is that there's no real creator on Snapchat because they're much smaller micro communities of just your friends and people pushing it. But then if you're there, then you're going to make that shoppable. It's this rise of the micro affiliate type of thing. Like it's that peer to peer sort of sales. People say that's a really interesting part. Still social commerce, it's still humans driving revenue.
MATT: Absolutely, yeah. Snapchat, you know, it's often, certainly for the younger demographic that's heavy users of it, you know, the app they open most, Snapchat, the one they spend most time using is TikTok and Snapchat. So, you know, Snapchat kind of is very good. The fact that it owns people's, the younger users kind of private spaces and conversations and connections with those sort of social connections and things. TikTok is really not, you know, for it being a social app, it's one of the major things it's not very good at is being social because actually, if you go into Snapchat, you've got the messaging and you can post stories and things like that. Same with Instagram, same with Facebook and stuff. You go to TikTok, you can post videos and create videos, you can consume everyone else's content, and there's a bolt on DM inbox that kind of, you just get crypto spam or whatever else. But actually they had job postings put up last year that there was a whole stream of work they're doing behind the scenes and the job posts were for making TikTok more social. And so I think one of the other things that they'll be doing in the background is actually building out direct messaging and all the things you get at the moment where you can do location tagging and you can share all sorts of different kind of formats of content in there. They've started to build out stories. One of the things that's been going on the last few weeks, and I was picked up in a story was about that. They've started testing 30 minute videos on TikTok now. They've also started incentivising people, sending them a message saying, if you post horizontal video that's more than a minute long, then we'll boost you and amplify you. That's more of a play because they won't push people to view on the big screen and so when they're pushing to their TV and casting TikTok to their TV or viewing it on TV, they want it to have more of the horizontal content but also longer form of content because they've dominated short form but the longer form piece they haven't. So they're massively incentivizing and that aspect of it as well. So yeah, there's a lot going on. You can understand now why my newsletter is so long. The things I've just said there is probably just a quarter of the newsletter for one week. It's just insane.
VERITY: It's one of those emails where you have to press that button right at the bottom says full email, entire message, and then you open it up and you're like, oh my God, I've been missing that for weeks.
MATT: Yeah. Some people kind of look at it and go, oh God, this is how much I need to catch up on things. It can either depress you or it can kind of excite you because you kind of know everything in one space. So yeah.
VERITY: Yeah. We've got one minute, so just quickly, sort of parting thoughts, what do you see this landscape looking like in the next sort of three to five years?
MATT: Yeah, I think that some of the things that we'll start to see, I think definitely the tension between of TikTok users and seeing a lot of shops, content and shops in general is it's going to be a sort of balancing act for the platform to manage. I think that the AR, VR stuff, I think still three, five years down the line. So I think for many people that's if you've got a big brand has got an experimental budget definitely worth experimenting with, but I think it's still very much a nominal sort of activity. I think that the UGC piece and advocacy and private sharing, all of that stuff, is the area where I would be sort of figuring out what the strategy is there and investing in having a much more robust kind of creator strategy as well and then using, get creators to come in. There's some companies I've worked for, get me to come in and tell them stuff because they like, we don't know how to work with creators. We don't know what to do in this space. So they kind of either don't do it at all because they're frightened to do it or they kind of just figure it out or they spend a lot of money with agencies, which is good for the agencies. But getting creators to come in then can really be useful. So I think that's worth experimenting with. The other thing I just scrolled down, I think the longer term things, one of the sort of interesting things that you know, metas started playing with is like, with their glasses and spectacles, it's like you'll be able to put them on and it'll be able to sort of pick up on items of clothing. You know, find me something that's similar to that top that my friend's wearing there, or, you know, give me the recipe for this and the ingredients I need. That sort of stuff where it becomes much more mixed reality and then how that ties into commerce and then links you through to whatever retail or a shop it is will become increasingly a thing in the latter part of this decade. But in the nearer term, sort of social SEO and using kind of the shops and commerce features, working with creators, being aware of the private social stuff. All of that is kind of really important. And I've probably got another 20 things in my doc. I should share that doc for anyone who wants it. It's just my notes. You can have it if you want to.
PAUL: Great, well, I'll add that afterwards. Amazing. Matt Navarra, thank you very much. That was incredible.
MATT: Thank you. Cheers.
Resources
Podcast
Blog
Guides & eBooks
About
Address
London
21 Lombard Street,
London, EC3V 9AH
Bristol
Runway East, 1 Victoria St,
Bristol, BS1 6AA
Copyright © 2024. All Rights Reserved by Duel. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy.