TikTok’s owner ByteDance is pushing a new campaign this week to promote its Pinterest-like app, Lemon8, according to three sources familiar with the effort.
The campaign tasked influencers to post videos on TikTok about a new “100 Bucket List Ideas” feature in Lemon8, where users can check off different experiences they’ve had, including: “stay up all night talking with your best friends” and “join a school club to meet new people.”
In the campaign brief, influencers were asked to post videos on TikTok showing themselves talking about or completing a task from the Lemon8 bucket list or offering “bucket list fails,” according to one of the sources who was a participating creator. They were also asked to add a Lemon8 link-out button in their videos that opened a page where followers could download the app.
In some videos, creators highlighted that they had checked off going to a music festival, watching the sunrise in a beautiful location, or having a “luxurious spa day.”
The “100 Bucket List Ideas” promotion is the latest in a series of pushes by Lemon8 to pay influencers to plug the app. A Business Insider review of TikTok posts related to Lemon8 found several from influencers that were tagged as a “paid partnership” in recent months, and the creator we spoke with confirmed they had participated in other campaigns for the app.
For example, a TikTok campaign in late 2023 advertised a separate Lemon8 “diary” feature to promote the app as a positive space, the creator told BI.
A ByteDance spokesperson said the diary format and #100BucketListIdeas activities were part of Lemon8’s efforts to encourage users to discover and share content on its app.
Lemon8, which calls itself a “lifestyle community” on the Apple app store, is primarily an image-based app with “Following” and “For You” pages similar to TikTok. Creators have previously described the app to BI as a cross between Instagram and Pinterest.
The company has been using influencer promotions for Lemon8 since early 2023 when ByteDance sought to jump-start app downloads as it rolled out in the US and UK.
While Lemon8 has by no means achieved the usage levels of its sister app TikTok, it has gradually gained an audience in the US and abroad. The app had around 7.5 million downloads globally in the first half of 2023, according to estimates from the analytics firm Data.ai. Lemon8 has since picked up steam, adding around 3.3 million downloads in the US and 12 million globally in the second half of 2023, a 160% increase from the first half.
Lemon8 jumped from averaging 13th in Apple’s app store rankings in July to third this month among US downloads of lifestyle apps, per market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
Lemon8 isn’t the only new social-media platform vying for users’ time, attention, and content. A wave of new social-media experiences, ranging from Pinterest-style grids to new photo-sharing or editing apps, has been capitalizing on a moment when time spent on TikTok is starting to plateau and users are fed up with veteran platforms like Instagram.
ByteDance is also trying to grow other content-creation apps outside of TikTok and Lemon8, including its widely popular CapCut video-editing tool.
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