Our Social Impact
The difference between Gen Z and other generations before them is social media. Social Media has always been in their lives and they have grown up knowing how to use it. Social media was one of the first things they were taught how to do and they are beginning to dominate the social media world. For them, it is not a fun platform like for Millenials it was; it can be treated as a job and a sense of marketing. To put it short: Gen Z has changed how social media is being used.
Many young people have businesses that are almost entirely created from Social Media. For example, many high school and college students may have an internship because of social media. They used social media to look at organizations in their desired field and then capitalize on that by applying to jobs. To add, many young people have LinkedIns which although it is a platform often used by adults; the platform has been gentrified to be used by young people.
Young people spend an average of seven hours per day on social media in 2019. Now, some of the platforms that were popular in the mid to late 2010s used by millennials are beginning to die out. These platforms are Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Platforms like TikTok and Twitter are rapidly getting more and more popular. There are a few reasons for this. On TikTok and Twitter, much of the app is spent being authentic and Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook were created to give you a false sense of reality. Another one comes down to marketing. Less focus is on platforms like YouTube and more focused on TikTok because it is quick and easy to go viral.
On another side of social media, there are dark social media. These platforms would include WhatsApp and Telegram. A trends manager Chase Buckle says, “The reality is, there’s probably a lot more brand advocates for a company than they first realized because they can’t trace a lot of the traffic to where the discussions are taking place.” This means that brands invest their money in large campaigns of name brand platforms like Facebook and Instagram, but also need to invest in platforms like WhatsApp.
Now there are also various ways different generations have used social media. Gen X and Millenials use it to keep up with people and share what is going on in their lives. Now, Gen Z can either treat it like it is a toy or as a business. At the heart of this change is video. According to GlobalWebIndex, video will drive an approximate 82 percent of all Internet traffic by 2022, and YouTube remains Gen Z's most successful social networking site. YouTube hired fashion head Derek Blasberg last year to improve brand partnerships on the website. To reach younger audiences, Louis Vuitton ran a series of videos with Gen Z YouTuber Emma Chamberlain and supermodel Karlie Kloss, while also enabling purchases through clickable video ads. This strategy has seen an 11-fold return on ad spending for the brand, while white space exists in this field as Facebook and Instagram are prioritized by brands.
In 2020, TikTok could gain more momentum as well. Because of its youth, the app launched as TikTok in the US in August 2018 after merging with Musical.ly, 41 percent of users of the short video-sharing site are aged 16 to 24, and in the last month, about 30 percent of Gen Z survey respondents who reported a "strong interest in fashion or beauty" had used TikTok.
But on TikTok, many advertisers have not been experts in reaching consumers. In April 2019, the company released its advertisement platform in beta, so advertisements are still uncommon and come at premium costs of about $10 per 1,000 views (Instagram ads have a CPM of $8 on average). TikTok content must appear unfiltered and organic, per the egalitarian, audience-led video algorithm, which does not favor videos based on the number of followers of the creator, to be received well.
In October 2019, Crocs established a TikTok account to target Gen Z clients, and it surpassed the number of the brand's followers on Twitter by 84,000 within a week. With brand ambassador Post Malone, the brand launched a TikTok challenge campaign using the hashtag #ThousandDollarCrocs, a reference to a lyric from Post Malone. The hashtag has since generated 2.5 billion views, says Michelle Poole, the brand's senior vice president and chief product and merchandising officer. She says, "It was staggering." "TikTok is the perfect vehicle for us to meet and have fun with our customers.”
In conclusion, Gen Z has changed and is as we speak changing the social media game how they see fit. This can range from politics to fashion. Gen Z saw an opportunity to take something that is theirs, gravitate towards it and then reinvent it.