Author: Bree Brouwer / Source: Tubular Insights As a digital media brand or publisher, you’re already familiar with the importance of bei
As a digital media brand or publisher, you’re already familiar with the importance of being where your audience is online if you want to spread brand awareness, share your message, and grow sales. You know creating branded content and influencer marketing campaigns on select platforms is the best way to reach the audiences you’re targeting.
For most brands, an influencer marketing campaign is usually relegated to popular social destinations like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. But new platforms keep popping up every year which attract hordes of online audiences and which brands shouldn’t ignore; one such platform is the social video sharing app Musical.ly.
What Is Musical.ly?
Launched in 2014 in China, musical.ly started as a way for users to create 15- to 60-second videos of themselves lip-syncing to popular songs, which they could then edit with proprietary tools and share with friends and family. Musical.ly took off in Asia before making its way to the United States and the rest of the world; by July 2015, it hit #1 in the Apple App Store in 19 countries. The app now boasts over 130 million users (known as “musers”) as of December 2016.
Out of these 130 million musers, 40 million of them are active each month, with 20 million of them in the U.S. alone. Roughly 12 million new videos per day are uploaded to the app, where users are more than happy to spend an average of 3.5 minutes per session viewing this content. At least 60% of the app’s musers are between the ages of 13 and 24, a figure which is equivalent to half of the teenagers in the whole of the U.S.
Musical.ly’s success convinced its founders to launch a live streaming companion app dubbed (appropriately) Live.ly. Many of you might remember this app’s official launch at VidCon in 2016; within a few days, Live.ly saw over 500,000 downloads and beat out apps like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and Instagram for the top position in the App Store.
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