3 strategies to be the most innovative social media creator company

Online media and internet companies face increasing pressure to innovate amidst changing social habits and sentiments. Features are here today and gone tomorrow, dependent on user needs and preferences. Emerging technologies throw curveballs into product roadmaps, as platforms seek to retain users, content creators, and merchants. Constant global disruptions like pandemic and war cause unpredictable shifts in user behavior. It can feel like a frenetic time to be publishing online, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

The secret weapon to creator company innovation? Deep user insights to inform strategic decisions. Through access to creators at scale and niche merchant verticals, NewtonX’s research partnerships with today’s top social media and internet companies have uncovered three key strategies to drive revenue growth and attract the most creative users of tomorrow.

1. Understand the diverse needs of your users

It’s tricky to track user preferences across platforms, demographics, and personal motivations. Instead of scrambling to follow competitor feature launches, the key to winning is found in understanding deep user needs. Armed with insights straight from influencers themselves, platforms can develop features and services to co-create strategies for user loyalty—based not on the quickest wins to engagement, but the most impactful routes to retention.

One of our clients—a leading social media company—wanted to track how their platform and monetization features stood up to competitors. NewtonX surveyed 1,000 verified creators across 14 geographic markets and charted their incentives towards which platforms they chose to participate on. To ensure a diverse set of answers at scale, we built detailed influencer searches to source respondents across location, following size, hashtags, keywords, and platforms. The data enabled the client to successfully pivot their own product roadmap to design a stickier monetization program, attracting more than 2M participating influencers. The number of creators earning six-figure revenues from monetizing their content has grown by 35%. 

While there’s power in scale, it’s also important to understand nuanced needs across user segments. A top social media platform came to NewtonX to survey minority community leaders responsible for advertising decision making—across SMBs, non-profits, and content creators—to understand how best to support them through weighty socio-cultural events. We provided them access to 2,500 respondents over the course of four waves of fielding. By facilitating direct access to the voice of users, our data ushered in insights for both the product and marketing teams, while enabling both sides to share in business success.

2. Test innovative features with forward-thinking merchants

The modern day marketplace isn’t what it used to be. It’s now distributed across the digital commons of our online media platforms, and in-house research and product teams race to develop selling features to beat the market incumbents, to attract and empower top sellers. The problem is access to these specialized B2B merchants. Platforms need research vendors who can find innovative audiences to test new marketing and product efforts in niche areas like live shopping and co-branded partnerships. 

For a social media and visual search platform, we delivered in-depth 1:1 consultations with 12 merchants responsible for making decisions on product catalogs and feeds. Our Custom Recruiting methodology sourced the exact sellers needed for the ideal sample, broken down by key verticals and online sales volume. We also provided our client with the opportunity to further screen respondents to verify that they were like-minded in creative selling approaches. 

Direct, hyper-targeted merchant communication is key for platforms to better understand seller goals, ensuring no time wasted on surveying stakeholders who aren’t providing the most valuable insights. It helps organizations value sellers not just as revenue generators, but more importantly, as collaborative demand generators that contribute to better business outcomes.

3. Design with emerging technology creators

The metaverse, NFTs, DAOs, and Web3 social platforms: these emerging concepts and communities are already attracting rising generations of content creators and influencers. For social media platforms to remain competitive, they must understand incentives around new models of community organizing and collective creation. Competitors are not only legacy social media platforms looking to innovate, but also emerging companies that are natively built on metaverse and blockchain technology. Moreover, participants like Gen Z and millennial creators are tough to find with traditional market research methods that scan professional platforms like LinkedIn. It takes a much more powerful methodology to access and filter through hard-to-find creator profiles. 

Leveraging our specialized search engine, NewtonX worked with a leading platform to source insights from 300 NFT collectors and 400 creators. This enabled the platform to prioritize features like adding crypto to creator tipping currencies, integrating NFT profile pictures, and developing experimental gallery features. Our client is now recognized as a forward-thinking space for Web3 content creators and developers to gather, unlocking new realms of business possibility and cultural impact.

Make confident business decisions based on deep insights

The key to being the social platform of the future? Making decisions based on deep insights, sourced directly from the users with the highest stakes. As a result, platforms will experience growth not simply fueled by ephemeral engagement, but by being true agents of cultural change, empowering the next generations of users to come.

NewtonX’s B2B research and strategic advisory services enable you to stay ahead of creator company competitors, with access to millions of talented content creators, top tier influencers, and forward thinking merchants. We find niche audiences at the scale you need. We partner with you to define samples and design surveys around your goals. Get in touch today to hear how custom research can solve your most pressing questions.