Creators Are Weighing Meta and YouTube for Social Commerce

Because YouTube is focused on video content, shoppable videos and livestreams work more like TikTok than Meta, with an easy shopping button displayed above the content and on a product “shelf” below the content.

To set up YouTube Shopping, channels must have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 hours of valid public viewing in the last 12 months, or 1,000 subscribers with 10 million views of valid public Shorts in the last 90 days. YouTube Shopping also requires connection to an existing ecommerce platform, such as Shopifyand does not offer its own native solution, which can be limiting to both brands and creators.

Until the expansion of YouTube’s business options, the platform is best suited for creators or brands with a healthy and engaged subscriber base and frequently produced, timely content that stands out.

Social search and alternative trading platforms

Regardless of the platform, buyers are increasingly turning to social instead of Google search for product research before making a purchase. The change in behavior is driven by younger consumers on TikTok, and this preference for visual, video-driven search results has pushed Meta and YouTube to offer paid social search ads as a complement to paid social campaigns.

For brands building Meta or YouTube shopping experiences, adding social search to the media mix and targeting smaller audiences can help boost social shopping success. And partnering with creators to amplify these efforts is likely to pay off—creator content has driven more social purchases than any other type of content, including brand-produced content, according to a March 2024 survey by eMarketer.

Beyond Meta and YouTube, there remains a place for Pinterestgiven their focus on visual content and shoppable pins that can fuel product discovery. Creators have also supplemented their visual content from TikTok and Instagram with longer-form content through the subscription-based platform. Substackwhich not only offers monetization for creators through its subscription model, but can also easily incorporate affiliate links for subscribers to purchase.

At the retailer end of the spectrum, Amazon Inspire is an app that connects brand and creator content directly to the Amazon marketplace with a focus on user-generated content. Since many creators promote their Amazon storefront through Amazon’s affiliate program, Inspire takes this a step further with video content.

Although these platforms are not exact replacements for TikTok, they still give creators another option or two that are worth looking at.