What is Lemon8?
Image credits: Lemon8
Before 2015, Instagram was the square-photos-only app that catered to its millennial audience with a touch of “amaro.” Fast-forward to 2023, and we see the conversation of social media ever-evolving. Lemon8, a photo-sharing app described as the love child between Pinterest and Instagram, has been turning heads on the scene since its launch in Japan in 2020. Now with at least 17 million downloads to date, it’s beginning to become a new player in the game, vying for the worldwide Gen Z audience.
Lemon8’s stand-out feature is its easy-to-use graphic design tool (think Canva if it were a social media platform) that encourages templates, stickers, music, text, and an overall emphasis on aesthetics and carousel-style posts. You can customize many aspects of your post, including the font, and even use a cut-out tool on photos. It allows for more customization that users on Instagram, TikTok, etc. would normally have to use third-party apps to provide.
Note to Canadians: Lemon8 is currently only available for download in the US - stay tuned.
The app caters to five main categories:
Beauty
Fashion
Food
Travel
Pets
Its main goal is to share informative and aesthetic content with a sprinkle of TikTok-esque video, but whether its style leads to more “authenticity” and a less saturated ad environment is still under investigation. However, it IS fun to see all the colourful content abound in the app.
Should I Be Using it as Part of My Social Media Strategy?
Brendan Gahan, Partner and Chief Social Officer at Mekanism, notes that while social media success can be challenging to attain and even harder to sustain, Lemon8's similarities to both TikTok and Xiaohongshu (a Chinese social media and e-commerce powerhouse) may give it an edge.
Though it has had a sizable following so far in Asia and Southeast Asia, it has only begun making a bit of an impact in the US after TikTok creators began mentioning it. So would we say it’s time to chuck all our other platforms and move to Lemon8? Not yet. However, it has clearly grabbed the attention of a certain Gen Z demographic, so it might be worth checking out if your brand has an especially aesthetic appeal that could provide value on the platform.