Lemon8 and the Race to Be First

It’s March of 2015 in the agency world. Your Vine influencers are outpacing benchmarks. The creative team has visions of scoring the year in review montage to a newer song called ‘Uptown Funk’. Your West Coast friend tells you about how they’re obsessed with a new fast-casual salad restaurant. But more importantly, your boss has just gotten back from SXSW. He saw The Roots do a late-night set on a stage made from preserved kale by a national grocery store chain, but what he really wants to talk about is how Meerkat is ready to take over the world.

Only then it doesn’t. In fact, neither does Periscope. Or Clubhouse. Or BeReal. Or Mastodon.

This concludes my POV on Lemon8 - the newest app that promises an environment to celebrate carefully curated aesthetic, consumerism and FOMO produced at scale. 

I kid. But before you secure your brand handle, here are some things to know…

What is Lemon8?

The app is new enough (less than a year) that the website is essentially a link to its place in the app store. A Google search brings up press first, and a link to download it in the app store second. Spend any time on the app and the vision becomes clear: it’s equal parts Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Choose between five established interest areas (fashion, beauty, food, wellness, and travel), create a login, and your feed is immediately populated with people working out, on vacation, and in some instances, working out on vacation.

From a UI standpoint, it mirrors Pinterest with multiple columns of content that you scroll through on mobile. For now, they have separate ‘Following’ and ‘For You’ tabs (a la TikTok and Twitter). Like Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram, there is a giant plus sign at the bottom to signify how you create content. And like Pinterest’s search setup, clicking the ‘Search’ tab will show you relevant hashtags with a visual preview of what you’ll find.

How is it different from the other apps mentioned?

Most of the press on the app characterises it as a combination of Pinterest and Instagram branded content, and it's easy to see why. Every post in the ‘For You’ tab feels curated to the last degree. If you were seeking more lifestyle influencers’ advice on core workouts or best-kept secrets of Barcelona, you’re in luck. Seemingly the livelihood of social apps these days is the ability to attract and retain content creators, so an app that focuses on them is a good place to start.

As the app grows, many will rely on the ‘Following’ tab to just keep in touch with friends. For right now, Lemon8 feels more like the answer to the non-existent question of, “What if we made the whole plane out of sponsored content?” In other words, will non-influencers use another app to share video and photos, so that all the sponsored content reaches real consumers? Only time will tell.

This app came out in June of 2022. Why the surge now?

ByteDance. If TikTok isn’t in the news enough these days, their parent company is also behind Lemon8. The timing around this surge in popularity for Lemon8 isn’t accidental. A cursory scan of most posts in the app are accompanied by “#Lemon8partner” which suggests they’re working as paid influencers on behalf of ByteDance. Whether or not the timing of Lemon8’s influencer surge is intended to distract from ongoing congressional hearings is a matter of perspective. What’s clearer is that their strategy (for now) is to become too big to shut down. But much like the future of TikTok, the future of Lemon8 - by virtue of their parent company – remains unclear.

Should I care as a brand?

The million-dollar question doesn’t have a clear answer right now. Certainly, challenger brands such as Chipotle, Nike, and Oreo find value in being the first to new platforms as it is something of a land grab. Aside from the headlines, they get to dictate the terms of engagement with consumers. Of the three, Chipotle is the only one with what appears to be an official brand page as of today. It is hard to argue there is no value in being one of the few brands on an emerging social platform aimed at gen z.

However, it’s not hard to see a future where this app doesn’t take off. Functionally, it doesn’t offer anything new, so much as combine a lot of existing features into a familiar package. Like many of the other “apps of the moment,” Lemon8’s future will rely on more than just attracting a user base and monetizing it for creators. They’ll need to offer something that can’t be replicated by Meta or Twitter. And if they’re able to do all of that, it does seem that their success would likely cannibalise some of their audience on TikTok.

All of this to say, you should secure your brand’s handle for now, but you can save your Lemon8 social strategy as a draft.