⚡ MC - People increasingly trust people over corporations

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People increasingly trust people over corporations

Consumers are increasingly trusting people over traditional corporations. Here's what this means for founders!

User-generated content

People are spending more time watching user-generated content (UGC). The most dramatic difference was among teens, who spend 56% of their time consuming UGC. By contrast, people aged 55+ spend 22% of their time consuming UGC. The main reason for this? Choice. According to the study:

Twice as many consumers report difficulty finding something to watch on traditional TV or recorded DVR than on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Plummeting engagement and viewership

According to recent Nielsen ratings, primetime news viewership was down by 36% across the three major cable networks: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Also, app downloads dropped 33% for the top 12 mainstream publishers, according to data from Apptopia.

Engagement was down as well. Interactions (likes, comments, and shares) dropped by 65% between 2020 and 2021 for major news publishers, despite more articles being published.

Website visits suffered as well. The top-performing US news websites took a hit by 8% in the first 11 months of 2021, according to SimilarWeb data.

Shopping on social media vs. traditional e-commerce

According to a new study from Accenture, the social commerce industry is expected to grow three times as fast as traditional e-commerce, hitting $1.2T by 2025.

This estimate is in line with what's been going on in Asia, where TikTok keeps stealing market share from traditional players like Alibaba.

What this means for founders

This is good news. People are increasingly preferring to interact with, and buy from, real people on social media, over supporting large, faceless corporations. And who could blame them? Big corporations like Amazon have been involved in a slew of controversy.

It appears that the future of gaining people's trust is essentially staying true to your real, human self, however cliché that might seem. 

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Snippets

• Growth Hacking Resources — 60+ free growth hacking resources.
• Purrfect UTM Builder by Stack Moxie — Free UTM builder for easy and error-proof URLs.
• Lukky — Social contests made easy. Quickly draw winners from the comments on social media platforms.
• Dickie Bush — I spent over 1,000 hours learning to write effectively. Here's everything I learned distilled into 11 tweets.
• Amanda Natividad — There’s a marketing tactic you’ve never heard of. It’s called Permissionless Co-Marketing. Here's what it is and how to do it
• Johnluke — Content is king. One 30 min video can turn into multiple TikToks, IG Reels, Blog post, Twitter threads.

Worth Reading

1. People spent more time on mobile apps in 2021 than ever before.

2. Cold email template that sells - How I got 100 signups for my beta SaaS.

3. How Grammarly Built A $13B+ Brand Targeting Simple Typos.

 Good Findings

• Dropious is a free Cross-Store Sales Channel App for Shopify Stores. Connect and sync products, stock and orders among Brands on Shopify. Join the Waiting List.

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