ByteDance's Lemon8: The TikTok Parent Company's New Attempt to Capture Social Media Users in the US Market

The Story Behind Lemon8

6 people subscribed to this newsletter and thank you

In February this year, ByteDance launched the sharing and exploring app Lemon8 in the UK and US regions. According to ByteDance's official introduction, the inspiration for "Lemon" comes from "Lemonade", hoping to share fresh things with everyone like a refreshing glass of lemonade. The "8" is derived from "∞ (infinity)", and Lemon8 aims to provide users with an endless supply of fresh things and discoveries.

By the end of March, the app had once entered the top ten in the App Store's popularity list and topped the lifestyle category, sparking a lot of enthusiastic discussion among users.

Today, I will share the product Lemon8 from a Chinese perspective.

ByteDance has a "sharing and exploring"（种草） heart

Although Lemon8 is described by many as a "combination of Instagram and Pinterest", Chinese users can see at a glance that the product form and direction of Lemon8 are almost like an overseas version of Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu has 96 million daily active users in China and is one of the fastest-growing platforms.

However, the lifestyle recommendation community in China is firmly occupied by Xiaohongshu. Several major companies, including ByteDance and Kuaishou, have tried to varying degrees, but none have succeeded.

As early as 2018, ByteDance launched the sharing and exploring community app "Xincao"（新草）, defining itself as "a sharing and exploring community that young people are visiting". However, due to ByteDance's direct continuation of Toutiao's strong algorithm and strong recommendation product logic at the time, the content publishing entrance was hidden very deep, which affected the vitality of original UGC publishing. Xincao stopped operating on August 1, 2019.

In 2021, Douyin（Chinese TikTok） established the "L Special Project" specifically targeting Xiaohongshu, with the main goal of improving the supply of high-quality graphic content on the Douyin platform, thereby increasing the DAU of users aged 18-40 in first and second-tier cities and capturing Xiaohongshu's core user base.

In July 2022, Douyin launched a lifestyle sharing and exploring community app called Croissant（可颂） in China. This product's internal project code is "G", and its slogan is "A New Lifestyle for Young People." Croissant adopts the same double-column waterfall layout as Xiaohongshu, with graphic and video content arranged alternately, with a ratio of roughly 50-50. Croissant's content is migrated from Douyin, so it has a noticeable short-video attribute. However, the content creation and upload within the app only support graphics and text, creating a certain difference between the two.

However, less than 20 days after its launch, Croissant was removed from various app stores and was not relaunched until March 31, 2023. ByteDance did not disclose the specific reason for Croissant's removal, but it may have missed its best opportunity for development.

ByteDance's years of experience have led the team to realize that if a product does not succeed, it might be due to the market. As a result, ByteDance turned its attention to the overseas market.

In March 2020, Lemon8's predecessor Sharee was launched in Japan. In September of the following year, Sharee was officially renamed Lemon8 and won the Best Lifestyle App in Japan's Google Play Best of 2021 that year.

At that time, Lemon8 mainly focused on beauty, fashion, home, and store exploration. Lemon8 aimed at filling the gap in Xiaohongshu's overseas market. According to Similarweb statistics, in January 2023, 88.3% of Xiaohongshu's main traffic came from mainland China, and 3.7% came from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Although Xiaohongshu's main site has penetrated Chinese communities in Malaysia, North America, and Australia, its primary traffic comes from within China.

The reason for initially focusing on Japan and Thailand is that both countries have no similar products and have relatively mature fashion and beauty industries. "Thai girls love makeup, and they basically dress up and wear makeup when they go out. Due to economic reasons, most of them choose local Thai makeup brands, making it convenient to buy, change, and try more products. In Thailand, there are also numerous beauty collection stores, making it easy for girls to shop in one place." Moreover, Thailand's influencer industry is well-developed, providing good content support.

According to several media reports, Japan is a relatively closed market, but ByteDance has previously laid a user base in Japan through products such as TikTok, BuzzVideo, and Capcut. Chen Ying, the person in charge of Lemon8, is also responsible for BuzzVideo.

Since its launch in Japan in 2020, Lemon8 has reached 4 million monthly active users worldwide and has been downloaded 16 million times, with Japan accounting for 38% of total installations, making it its largest market.

TikTok helps Lemon8 to gain popularity

ByteDance's experience in operating Lemon8 in Japan and Thailand has made it clear to the team that no matter which market they enter, Lemon8 must recruit local teams for content operation and marketing management. Assigning the task of connecting local users and creators to local employees is one of ByteDance's common strategies.

At the same time, the methods of building a creator ecosystem and the accumulated creator resources from TikTok are also important factors in the launch.

In February this year, after Lemon8 was launched, it soon began actively recruiting creators. A PPT shared with marketing companies in January shows that Lemon8's ideal creator profile is a 22-26-year-old female who focuses on beauty and fashion and is based in New York or Los Angeles.

In an email to influencers, Lemon8 invites them to apply to become creators. Once selected, creators need to post a certain number of posts, each containing 3-10 images and at least 150 characters in the title, in order to receive a small stipend. The email also mentions that ByteDance plans to launch a global promotion campaign in May to increase the number of users.

After the first half of the year's planned promotion and content accumulation phase, Lemon8 plans to start monetization in September, helping creators generate income from brand collaborations or other forms of advertising.

In addition to email recruitment, TikTok's strong user and creator base has also become a promotional platform for Lemon8.

On TikTok, creators encourage users to follow them on Lemon8. According to foreign media statistics, Lemon8's topic tags on TikTok have been viewed more than 2.4 billion times. On Lemon8, most videos that receive over 1,000 likes are posted by creators who already have significant influence on TikTok.

Under the #lemon8 topic, many creators are encouraging users to download Lemon8 in case TikTok is actually banned. On the Lemon8 platform, when you randomly open a post, you'll see comments from users saying, "I came from TikTok."

Furthermore, Lemon8 allows users to link their TikTok and Instagram accounts, making it easy to cross-promote across multiple accounts and attract more followers.

The official slogan doesn't shy away from leveraging the halo of its star product: "TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, invites you to become a creator before Lemon8 officially enters the US market!"

Of course, ByteDance is one of the companies best at spending money on advertising. According to statistics from various platforms, Lemon8 has released 550,000 ad creatives in the past 365 days, with a strict deduplication count of 55,000.

Currently, Lemon8's official social media accounts on the three major platforms have a combined follower count of over 700,000. Judging from the content update frequency and the number of followers, Instagram seems to be Lemon8's main media channel. The posts on Lemon8 mainly feature recommended creators, popular content, and promotional campaign updates. The importance of platform-officially recommended creators in creator incentives was verified by Instagram years ago. Therefore, Lemon8 not only recommends users within the platform but also further exposes creators and content through external recommendations.

More Than Just TikTok

Lemon8's rise in attention overseas is not only due to its sudden rise in rankings but also related to the ongoing ban controversy surrounding TikTok. The week before Lemon8 entered the leaderboard, TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi had just attended a hearing. However, TikTok's current situation is not optimistic.

As a company with a global vision, ByteDance will now make more strategic moves beyond TikTok. Previously, the video editing app Capcut, the international version of Jianying, was also quite popular in the United States, with over 200 million monthly active users worldwide. Last year, global downloads increased by 43%, exceeding 400 million times, with about 7% coming from the United States.

Lemon8 could be a new attempt; however, in the US market, if it wants to compete with Instagram, Lemon8 will need to come up with more strategies to attract these users.