It’s a new year, and as we welcome 2023, we hope you found solace, solemnitude and joy over the holidays. Now it’s “back to the grind” for most of us, and with the new year comes a time of research and planning for the months ahead. Ardent strategists, we’re always looking ahead and keeping tabs on the trends, research and data that impact districts like yours. Within this document, we’ve rounded up themes, trends and topics we see bubbling to the top from the worlds of urban place management, destination marketing, placemaking, urban planning and economic development.

Read on for tips and tools to make your job easier, validate your direction, spark your passion and pique your curiosity — all in the name of supporting your constituents, members and ratepayers. We’re keeping this pretty high-level, so if you want to learn more, dig deeper or would like a personal consultation to discuss what this might mean for your district, please give us a shout!

 

Social Media

The “tok” is the talk of the town. Well, the whole internet, really. And it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Despite efforts at the federal and some local levels that ban the use of Chinese-owned TikTok app from municipal phones, for place-based marketers and your constituents, it’s a place you need to be.

 

The salad days of wild growth and engagement on Facebook and Instagram are gone, and they are now what they’ve always intended to be; highly targeted advertising platforms that deliver dollars to investors and shareholders. Period. Other than Instagram Reels, you’ll need to pay to play, but explosive growth, discovery, engagement and shopping (yes, shopping — we’ll get to that in a minute), are squarely on TikTok these days.

 

And when looking across all of our clients, plus industry trends, analyst insights and anecdotal feedback from merchant marketing sessions we’ve done with districts for their ratepayers — the upside cannot be ignored. Unlike more traditional social media channels, TikTok is all about discovery, and their algorithm works to bring you unprecedented growth and visibility for your district’s stories, events and placemaking, if you play your cards right. And that doesn’t mean you need slick, polished professional video. But you do need a crafty strategy, authenticity and a willingness to dedicate time, energy and resources to this white-hot platform.  

Some things to consider with TikTok:

 

  • 53% of TikTok users are over 30¹
  • 13.6% of US TikTok users have an HHI of $75K – $100K, and a whopping 40.2% have an HHI of $100K+!¹
  • Users skew 57% female to 43% male on their gender binary¹
  • On average, TikTok users spend 95 minutes per day on the platform and open it 8 times per day¹
  • TikTok users are 1.5x more likely to immediately purchase something they discovered on the platform compared to other social media platform users¹
  • TikTok users are 1.5x more likely to convince a friend or family member to buy a product they’ve seen on the app¹
  • TikTok users are 2.4x more likely to create a post and tag a brand after buying a product¹
  • 67% of users says that TikTok inspires them to shop — even when they weren’t planning to do so²
  • 40% of Gen Z users prefer using TikTok and Instagram for search over Google³
  • And anecdotally, we’ve gotten feedback from small businesses who attended our merchant marketing sessions who told us:
    • “I gained 12K+ followers in the past 24 hours!”
    • See next page for a case story!

 

STAKEHOLDER SUPPORT

Bright Brothers hosted a merchant marketing session for one of our downtown client’s stakeholders that focused on connecting with Gen Z, as well as best practices for TikTok. Soon after, we received the following, lovely email full of thanks and praise from one of the district’s small businesses:

 

“I started my account a day or two after your workshop. I didn’t link any accounts or use my contacts to find friends, so I started completely from scratch. About a month in, I started making bag sales online almost every day. Previously, I almost never had online bag sales. This past weekend one of my videos kind of took off, and I sold 30 bags in about 48hrs.

The video got over 100k views over the weekend and it seemed like everytime I refreshed my email, there was another order notification.

The craziest part is that I’ve spent 11 years making photos and videos for Facebook, IG, and YouTube and never have come close to getting any kind of traction like I’ve gotten with TikTok–literally in less than 3 months from opening my account.

Anyways, I just wanted to take a minute to tell you that I am singing your praises to people a couple times a day, and I have no idea how I’m going to fulfill all the orders.”

That’s a GOOD problem to have! 

*Courtesy of Werther Leather Goods, Norfolk, VA

 

TWITTER KILLER?

Despite all the brouhaha about the future of Twitter, the staple social networking service is limping along after business magnate Elon Musk finally acquired it in late October 2022. Since that time, it’s been a rocky road for the 280-character-long platform. Musk’s volatile takeover has included a back-to-office order that didn’t sit well with many employees, a mass exodus of staff and brain trust at nearly every level internally, a diaspora of advertisers resulting in millions in lost revenue, and thousands of users fleeing (or looking to leave) the formerly-favored platform.

 

But what comes next? There’s no clear consensus. With myriad upstart start-ups looking to take a bite out of Twitter’s market share, many are racing to bring betas to market and grow their user bases, including open source and collaborative communities like Mastodon, Post and others. 

 

Additionally, formerly-abandoned industry-leading apps like Tumblr (which experienced massive fallout and fell out of favor after the enforcement of stricter content policies surrounding adult content in 2018), are now seeing an upswing in users fleeing Twitter. Case in point, as reported by Tech.co in November 2022, “Tumblr, a still widely-used but ultimately more historical social media platform, saw 301,000 post-acquisition downloads compared to 170,000 for the same period beforehand.”⁴

 

Some, like WIRED’s Morgan Meaker posit that LinkedIn is the way to go, and Marketing Brew’s Jack Appleby put out some quantifiably discerning stats regarding cross-posting from Twitter to LinkedIn — and looked at the exponentially positive numbers he saw on the professional networking platform.⁵,⁶  

 

At the end of the day, there’s still no clear “Twitter killer” (aside from Musk himself), and the drama will continue to unfold, so any singular replacement probably remains to be seen in 2023.