It’s the Creator Economy and We’re Just Working In it

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Social video has emerged as the place where cultural trends originate, which means that utilizing the format is no longer a “nice-to-have” for marketers and creators looking to grow.

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According to digital consultancy Tubular Labs in its research paper “Navigating Social Video in 2023: What you need to thrive,” engaging target audiences is a key objective for many brands, and social video is a “must-have” channel to achieve this goal.

However, the speed at which trends turnover is getting faster and faster. In one three-month period more than 1.3 million sports-related videos were uploaded across multiple platforms. The volume of video uploaded to social sites can overwhelm even the best resourced marketing teams.

“This means that waiting to catch a new popular sound, hashtag or TikTok challenge on your social feed could lead to missing the window of opportunity,” Tubular notes in the paper, which has the goal of prompting marketers to partner with it to access data insights.

Over the past year alone, influencer-created content was watched 13.2 times more than media and brand content combined. And more growth is coming. Based on past two-year growth trends, Tubular anticipates the influencer market to continue to move upwards in 2023.

eMarketer also projects that 78.6% of marketers will incorporate influencer marketing into their strategies in 2023 — a near 18% growth from 2020 and a forecasted $16 billion in spend.

Tubular data shows that, on average, trending audio clips, or “sounds,” on social have a short two-week window from origin to their peak before dropping in popularity of viewership.

“That’s why it’s so imperative that companies make informed decisions based on data that goes deeper than vanity metrics such as likes and views,” Tubular insists. “Some creators have audiences that are massive but less likely to convert, while others have smaller audiences with enormous conversion rates. Certain creators might drive sales to a wide net of product categories while others are homed in on just one or two.”

Then, there are values and skill sets to consider — especially if this individual might be a long-term partner or brand consultant. Certain creators are live-stream gurus that drive major product sales while others have perfected the art of high-quality produced video that could better suit another brand.

Virtual worlds (aka the metaverse) are also becoming more of a mainstay and less of a future-state for consumers and marketers, Tubular finds. In the past year, nearly 15 billion videos were apparently uploaded across platforms tagged with a term related to augmented or virtual reality. This nets to a 38% growth against the year prior, “and is a clear business signal that social audiences are interested in engaging in the topic.”

Researchers at CCS Insight further predict year-over-year growth for VR hardware sales, fueled by standalone devices and the development of glasses products.

“Brands and marketers that want to emerge as leaders in the social space,” says Tubular, “can’t afford to watch innovative experiences slip by.”