@IScreamSocialMedia

The iScream Social Media Blog

TikTok Purchase Study, Instagram Stories “Likes”, and Facebook’s Downfall?

Educational Newsletters

Another day, another installment of our Social Media Round-up. Let’s not waste any time and get right into the biggest social media news that’s come out over the past weeks.

1. TikTok Has Become a Key Part of The Purchase Journey

A new study has found that TikTok is a key part of the purchasing journey for consumers. The study, itself, aims to identify TikTok’s role in and perceptions across the retail consumer journey.

TikTok has taken a new approach to the buyer’s journey. If this is intentional or not, we may never know, but instead of the “sales funnel” that many marketers are used to, TikTok has described their path to purchase as an “infinite loop”.

Instead, consumers enter, exit, and re-enter the purchasing journey at different stages based on their wants and needs.

Compared to users on other social media platforms, TikTok users are:

  • 1.5x more likely to immediately go out and buy something they discovered.
  • 1.5x more likely to convince a friend of family member to buy a product they’ve seen on the app.
  • 2.4x more likely to create a post and tag a brand after buying a product.
  • 2x more likely to comment or DM a brand after making a purchase.
  • 1.3x more likely to feel excited or euphoric about product purchases.
  • 1.4x more likely than users on other platforms to research products and brands they discover.

Remember years ago when we told everyone to jump on the TikTok train because it was going to be a booming platform? Turns out, we were right.

2. Instagram Adds “Likes” to Stories

Instagram has added a new, simple way for users to engage with Stories content with Stories likes, which enables you to ‘like’ any Story in your feed, and let the creator know, without having to start up a DM conversation.

As demonstrated by Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, now, down the bottom of your Stories view in the app, you’ll see a new heart icon, which, when tapped, will send the creator of that Story a like.

Stories likes are not public, and only the creator will be able to see them. Creators will be able to view their Story likes in their Story insights, with a small heart icon added next to the viewers’ name in the view listing.

And as noted, Stories likes will not come through as a DM, so you’re not suddenly going to get an influx of DMs as people use the function to react to your Stories.

It could be a handy way to increase Stories engagement, while it might also add another signal for Instagram to use in ranking the Stories in your feed, and highlight those most likely to be of interest.

3. Has Facebook Hit a Brick Wall?

This isn’t necessarily news, but just something that digital marketers need to keep an eye on going forward. Things have not been looking good for Meta over the past few weeks. Shares have fallen almost 25% after the announcement of the first drop in daily user numbers in the social media giant’s history, and that drop may even continue with the announcement of Meta potentially leaving Europe.

We don’t necessarily care about the shares dropping, unless you’ve invested in the company, but we do care about the drop in daily users and overall revenue. The reasoning behind this could be any number of issues. It could be Apple’s fault because of their iOS 14.5 update which allows users to opt out of being tracked by Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram across other apps.

The drop could also be TikTok’s fault because they are the most popular social media platform and users are deciding not to come back to Facebook after enjoying their experiences on that platform. Or it could be as simple as the fact that while Facebook has nearly 2 billion users, and there are only 5 billion people aged 20-80. So they might have just capped off their available market for the time.

But the biggest takeaway from this is that social media marketers cannot just be comfortable with sticking with one social media outlet and hope that they stay on top forever. Add those new platforms to your social media marketing strategy so all of your bases are covered just in case anything like this happens.

If you need help with managing any of your social media marketing efforts, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, contact us or give us a call at 305-455-0720