Everyone in digital marketing should know the stalwarts of social media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, you know the rest. But savvier specialists are always on the lookout for the next big thing.
As experts in white label social media management, Agency Stack was excited to inspect these future favourites and the trends that give them the potential to go viral.
We’ve considered the total users, the latest funding, and the economic moat of these selections and wouldn’t be surprised to see any of them gaining traction in the next five years.
Make sure to contact Agency Stack to discuss any of these platforms, or throw another name into the ring. We’re always looking to expand our knowledge in social media, as well as that of our clients. Now, without further ado…
WeAre8
If your agency or one of your clients is willing and able to give back to society, then WeAre8 may be the perfect opportunity.
This heart-warming platform is “all about making a big impact through small, daily actions,” it claims. Users are presented with eight minutes of content every day and each video watched earns rewards for them and charities simultaneously.
Ads are placed by a business and users can opt-in to watch them for previously mentioned rewards – for example, “watch this ad from Agency Stack to earn 10 points and a donation will be made to UNICEF.” This opt-in model ensures that your content will be viewed by those who are most interested in the content.
The platform has almost 10,000 Twitter followers and reportedly earned $US16.9 million in funding in mid-2022.
Substack
Considering email marketing has proven so vastly successful and durable in the evolution of digital marketing, it makes sense that Substack is rising to power.
This is a platform for newsletter creation where individuals and businesses can create their own publications for loyal subscribers to enjoy.
Such publications could combine content from a personal website, blog, email newsletter, podcast or wherever else they have been creating.
The site had grown to 1 million subscribers by 2021 and the top 10 content creators combined for roughly $20 million in earnings that year. This is thanks in part to the fact that writers earn roughly 86% of the royalties on their work, while Substack takes 10%.
Today, the platform has 35 million active subscriptions, including 2 million paid subscriptions.
If you believe in your loyal customer base and have enough content to satisfy demand, Substack may be the place for your brand to bring it all together.
Polywork
Getting sick of LinkedIn or feeling like the traditional corporate model is cramping your style? Polywork has been developed to encourage the “hustle culture” that continues to become the norm in today’s society.
Where LinkedIn calls for one headline to describe what each user “does,” Polywork allows for multiple points to describe a person’s projects, hobbies, and side gigs.
After raising another $28 million in April 2023, bringing their total to almost $45 million, Polywork may well stick around for years to come – more than 27,000 Twitter followers sure think so.
Lemon8
When you’re owned by TikTok parent company, ByteDance, you’re sure to receive plenty of attention online. But Lemon8 is growing in popularity for more reasons than that – the platform is said to have combined the best bits of TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram. This culminates in a visual experience that makes it hard to distinguish sponsored content from organic (whether that’s good or bad is up for debate).
What’s not up for debate is the sheer nature of its spike in popularity, with more than five million downloads on the Google Play Store and chart-topping numbers on the App Store too.
Content on Lemon8 is categorised into six topics: Fashion, Beauty, Food, Wellness, Travel, and Home. Influencers in these veins should flock to Lemon8 to stake their claim on a promising market.
Post
This Twitter alternative was launched in late-2022 by the former CEO of Google subsidiary Waze, Noam Bardin. In just one month, the platform reportedly had more than half a million users on a waitlist.
As you create an account and log in to Post for the first time, you are greeted with a clear message: “Welcome to a civil place for real people to debate ideas and learn from experts, journalists, and individual creators.”
We can’t summarise Post any better than that – this is a new, trusted news source. Elon Musk may have pumped billions of dollars into Twitter, but Post has also received an undisclosed sum from the same venture capital firm that contributed $400 million to Twitter. Therefore, it sure has potential.
To learn more about this platform, follow Bardin’s advice and listen to his interview about Post on the Pivot podcast.
Contact Agency Stack
It would have been too easy for us to run through the usual suspects – Instagram reels, TikTok, and even BeReal is becoming mainstream.
Instead, we take you one step further and prepare fellow agencies for the future of social media marketing. If you need our support to navigate this interesting period for the industry, get in touch and we’ll figure this all out together.