TikTok ban threat drives a surge in Lemon8 downloads in the US
Lemon8, a sister app of TikTok, rapidly and quietly climbed to the top of the App Store’s Lifestyle category while the majority is still focusing on scrolling through video clips of TikTok’s CEO being grilled by US lawmakers at last week’s hearing.
The rapid rise of the new social app, which officially launched in the US in early March, has once again proved TikTok’s unparalleled marketing prowess in today’s social media landscape.
“TikTok had another baby, it’s called Lemon8. It’s almost as if Pinterest meets Instagram, meets TikTok, all wrapped in one,” TikTok user @keanna.moore said in her post.
“@keanna.moore” isn’t the only one describing Lemon8 as a combination of TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram, in fact, it’s the most prevalent catchphrase when TikTokers introduce Lemon8 to their audiences.
Before entering the US market, Lemon8 had been active in Southeast Asia for some time and is presently one of the top three most downloaded lifestyle apps in Thailand and Indonesia on the App Store.
Launched in 2020, Lemon8 is widely interpreted as ByteDance’s attempt to create another Xiaohongshu in the overseas market. Beijing-based ByteDance is also the parent company of TikTok.
As the most influential social app in China, Xiaohongshu has a visual interface similar to Pinterest but stands out with its robust user community and extensive content. More specifically, it supports video or photo sharing like Instagram and Pinterest, but it also encourages users to write in-depth reviews of electronics, travel, restaurants, experiences, or share life hacks, etc., like they might do on Yelp, Trip Advisors, Reddit, or other forums.
This makes Xiaohongshu like an encyclopedia of life, where you can find almost anything – an experience unlike any other, which is why it has become a disruptor in the Chinese social media space and why ByteDance wants to bring it to the international market.
On TikTok, views under #lemon8 reached 2.3 billion. While this number includes views from Lemon8’s other markets, such as Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and other countries, the majority of the latest generated and most viewed posts are from the US market.
TikTok’s traffic support may have largely contributed to the surge in Lemon8 downloads. App intelligence provider Apptopia told TechCrunch that it hasn’t seen paid search spend for Lemon8 on the App Store or Google Play, but cautioned that it may have paid install activity that just hasn’t populated its system yet, or that the spend is on networks it doesn’t have insight into.
Also, Lemon8’s marketing strategy has been savvy in leveraging TikTok creators’ concerns over the app potentially getting banned. In some of the top-viewed video clips under #lemon8, creators recommend that people should download Lemon8 as a backup option in case TikTok does get banned in the future.
Marketing support from TikTok can also be found on Lemon8. On my For You page, I clicked on a few random posts and saw many comments below saying “here from TikTok”, “I’m from TikTok too.”
So far, TikTok users who have downloaded Lemon8 have generally given positive feedback on the app for the novelty it offers and the chance to gain more followers— and these reviews can be found under the hashtag #Lemon8.
“Think of Instagram in 2011, 2012, 2013, think of YouTube around that time, think of TikTok in 2020 around COVID…Lemon8 is a greenfield, my personal strategy on Lemon8 is I’m gonna give advice and do more long form,” said @laylool, who has 152,300 followers, in her TikTok post.
Some TikTok users are also aware that Lemon8 is not a viable option as a backup plan for TikTok because it is also owned by the Chinese company ByteDance — and TikTok has come under fire from US lawmakers for its Chinese roots.
However, Lemon8’s recent scrappy move in the US market is likely to be putting pressure on Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram. As one TikTok user put it, “(Lemon8 is) Definitely not a replacement for TikTok, but definitely a replacement for Instagram.”