Social Media Platforms

The conclusions of the 2026 #TravelTrends report, created annually by the Barceló Hotel Group, show a clear shift in the way people travel and make their selection criteria. TikTok has established itself as a travel compass at a time when experiences have become one of the industry's biggest drivers and when travellers prioritise well-being, local connections and personalised itineraries. Social media platforms remain a key touchpoint in the trip inspiration phase and in building brand awareness and affinity. According to the report, 49% of travellers believe that the most useful content on #TikTok is that which shows real personal experiences and practical recommendations. This trend, known as TikTokfluence, confirms that travellers prioritise authenticity over aspirational aspects, and they seek out specific references that help them decide. In this sense, influencer marketing is gaining importance as a strategic lever: content creators not only inspire, but they also offer credibility, strengthen brand positioning and accompany travellers from the discovery phase to the consideration stage. That same connection logic also applies to planning: #experiences have become the driving force of travel, influencing the destination and how the trip is organised. In fact, 40% state that they plan a trip based on the experiences they want to have in each area, prioritising variety and flexibility. The Barceló Hotel Group believes that understanding these changes and being two steps ahead of them forms part of how we design the hotel experience: more connected to the destination, more personalised and aligned with what today's travellers want.

From Query to Cart: How #TikTok is Reshaping the Journey from Discovery and Search to Performance I’m proud to share the launch of our new whitepaper “From Query to Cart”, developed by Deloitte Digital and Deloitte Advanced Analytics Spain in close collaboration with TikTok. What started as a simple question – how do people really discover, evaluate and buy today? – quickly turned into a fascinating deep dive into how short‑form, creator‑driven content is transforming the path from inspiration to purchase. Our research shows that TikTok is no longer just about awareness or entertainment. It plays a meaningful, often underestimated role across the entire customer journey, from intentional search and spontaneous discovery to trust, conversion and long‑term brand loyalty. A few questions we explore in the whitepaper: Why does discovery increasingly start without an explicit search intent? How does creator content change trust and decision‑making? What does this mean for brands still optimizing for linear funnels instead of multi-touchpoint journeys? This work would not have been possible without an outstanding, cross‑border team and true partnership. A big thank you to the teams at Deloitte Digital and Deloitte Advanced Analytics Spain, and to our partners at TikTok for the openness, ambition and shared curiosity: Davide Fabrizio Matthias Höckh Yon Vidaurreta Herrera Inés Unterberger Antonio Manuel Gázquez García Esteban Ribero @Rachek Ryan Jenny Fernandez Giulia Bessi Daniele Nickel Natalie Schuler If you’re rethinking how brands grow in a world where culture, content and commerce collide, I encourage you to take a look. Link to the whitepaper in the comments #DeloitteDigital #TikTok #FromQueryToCart #CustomerJourney #DigitalCommerce #BrandBuilding #ShortFormContent #MarketingTransformation

Based on my last market analysis here is another slide that show the industry shift with real useful insights! TikTok didn’t just enter the toy industry... It rewired it. We used to design products, ship them to shelves, and hope demand would follow. Now demand is created before the product even matters. Discovery → desire → purchase → content → repeat All in one loop... All in one platform. And the numbers are hard to ignore: - TikTok is now the #1 driver of toy discovery. - 70%+ of Gen Z finds toys there. - Collectibles are exploding. But the real shift is deeper than stats... Control has moved. - From brands → to creators - From retailers → to algorithms - From planning → to momentum Toys are no longer just bought.... They’re performed, shared, hunted. That’s why things like: - Blind boxes - Unboxing moments - Scarcity drops - “Satisfying” play patterns - …are winning. Because they’re not just products... They’re content. And if your product doesn’t live on TikTok, it’s invisible. The uncomfortable truth: a great toy that doesn’t generate content will lose to an average toy that does. So this is the new game: - You’re not designing toys anymore. - You’re designing viral loops. And the brands that understand that…are building the future of play in real time. #toys #toynews #toyworld #thetoyinsider #thetoybook #thetoysthatmadeus #toyindustry #keepsmiling Eolo Toys ToyZone

Are social and video platforms the new search engines? Paid search commands 22% of total media budgets. There’s a lot at stake for marketers to make this count, so we need to get our facts straight when it comes to how this pivotal channel is evolving. And the fact is, search has been completely redefined. That’s why I’m so excited to share our latest report, in which WARC and TikTok partnered to dive into the nuance what's changing in the search landscape. So how is the landscape changing? 🌟 Among US search users, search on social and video channels is being adopted at 2x the rate of AI search platforms 🌟 Gen Z search on TikTok almost as often as the leading traditional search platform (86% searching weekly vs 90% on the leading traditional search platform) 🌟Social proof is a search superpower. Audiences are 1.2x more likely to trust a brand claim when it comes from a creator than from the brand itself! And this isn't just consumers showing up in different places - its a fundamental shift in how search is used as a tool. ⚡ THEN: Search used to be an information retrieval tool. Consumers knew what they were looking for, typed in the query, and hit search to close the loop. 🧭 NOW: In dynamic media environments, consumers don't just search to find an answer - they search as a way to explore. They start a search to tune in to a specific content experience: entertaining, educational, relational, experiential, and more. This type of search offers new potential for marketers: a consumer might not have made a direct search for you or your category, but they're in discovery mode in a very compact purchase journey. Resonating in those moments is key. A single search can lead a consumer to explore, discover, browse perspectives, form their opinion, and buy – all at once. This new report is a great resource for beginning to rethink your approach to search. It includes: 💯 New data from a global consumer survey on search habits 🧠 New behavioral science research from Richard Shotton, so that you can future-proof your strategy by rooting it in unchanging behavioral science principles 🎙️ Perspectives from some leading marketers on how the landscape is shifting and what strategies they’re using to see results. Thank you to Joe McCambley, Paul Ruscoe, Neil Zhao, Tuncay Yavuz, Rahul Karam, Yeongdon Min for your insights 🎯 A simple framework for adapting your search strategy to the new landscape And I must say... a huge thank you to to the brilliant team at TikTok for Business who collaborated on this work. Sissi (Qiongwen) Xu Rachael Ryan Esteban Ribero Daniele Nickel Jaclyn Williams Alina Huang Simon Bartholomew X. Stephen Pak 💫

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew offered a rare look under the hood of TikTok’s algorithm and the key takeaway is this: TikTok isn’t a social graph, it’s an interest graph powered by math at scale. The platform doesn’t prioritize who you follow or who you know. Instead, it reads behavioral signalswatch time, likes, shares, replays and uses pattern recognition and collaborative filtering to identify clusters of users with similar tastes. From there, it surfaces content those users love, often anticipating your interests before you can articulate them yourself. This is why TikTok has fundamentally changed content discovery. Virality isn’t reserved for accounts with large followings; it’s earned through relevance. Any video can break through if the algorithm detects strong engagement signals early. Chew also emphasized TikTok’s ongoing investment in safety, combining AI-driven systems with human moderation to balance scale with responsibility. The real insight? TikTok’s advantage isn’t data alone it’s how quickly it learns, adapts, and turns attention into discovery. #TikTok #Algorithms #ContentDiscovery #CreatorEconomy #AI #MachineLearning #DigitalMedia #SocialPlatforms #TechInsights

🎧 82% of Gen Z discover music through social media or UGC, compared to just 33% via recommendations on streaming music services (Source: Deloitte, 2024). 🤳 Tiktok curators like Carly Bogdajewicz—armed with a playlist and a camera—are driving streams, building communities and shaping taste with her audience of 83k+ TikTok followers, 6.8M likes and 280 Spotify playlists followed by over 66k listeners. Carly started making videos about her Spotify playlists in her college dorm room in 2019—then, the music industry came knocking. Now, she’s building a career and a community around her passion for indie folk and pop music. 🎶 On TikTok, the same formats that can flatten music into anonymous soundbites and background noise for trends can also be used by passionate tastemakers like Carly to build interactive communities around music discovery. Carly’s story represents a broader shift from centralized music gatekeepers to fragmented, fan-driven discovery. She is part of a long lineage of tastemakers who sit between the artist and the listener: radio programmers, music journalists, MTV VJs, bloggers. 💿 The formats change, but one constant is: there's clear demand from artists and marketing teams to get heard, and listener demand for discovering new artists. The next-gen music platform needs to include tools for curators (not just artists) to truly build, reach and monetize their audiences. Music creation and curation are symbiotic, they need each other! The big question is: Who pays for music curation? Marketers? Brands? Platforms? Fans? I wrote about this shift, and Carly’s story, in this months newsletter. Link in the comments! 

Google isn't the only place discovery happens anymore. But many brand strategies still assume it is. 74% of Gen Z uses TikTok for search (GWI/Global Web Index). A growing share starts product discovery in ChatGPT. 51% of Gen Z now prefer TikTok over Google as their primary search engine (Adobe, 2025). Ranking on Google alone is no longer sufficient. And for many categories, it's no longer primary. In my advisory work, I keep hearing the same question from CMOs. Usually asked with some urgency: "How do we show up in AI search?" This is the answer: creator content is no longer marketing. It's discovery infrastructure. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗦𝗘𝗢. LLMs, TikTok, Instagram, Google AI Overviews. They all rely on existing human content. AI-generated content is everywhere, which makes real creator content more valuable, not less. Human content trains the algorithms. It's what people trust in social search. In practice, creators are now doing what blogs and landing pages used to do. Except people actually trust them. 𝗠𝗶𝗰𝗿𝗼-𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗼 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻'𝘁. One-off influencer posts don't move search. Hundreds of creators posting authentic, keyword-aligned content creates the kind of content density algorithms reward. Volume plus consistency wins. 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗘𝗢, 𝗔𝗜 𝗦𝗘𝗢, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗘𝗢 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴. Short-form video now ranks in Google. Creator content across platforms compounds visibility everywhere. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 (Statusphere first-party data): A global beauty brand deployed 763 creators. TikTok search +143%. Google search +70%. 33.9M engagements. Products sold out nationally. Impact lasted months after the campaign ended. This isn't theoretical. It's repeatable. Brands that treat creators as a performance channel will lose. Brands that treat creators as search infrastructure will win. Where are you seeing discovery shift? TikTok, ChatGPT, or somewhere else entirely? I met Founder/CEO Kristen Wiley the same day Statusphere announced their $18M Series A. After our conversation, the raise made sense. She's building real discovery infrastructure for an AI-first world. #CreatorEconomy #ContentStrategy #DigitalTransformation #NotSponsored

Almost half of all U.S. consumers now use TikTok as a search engine. Adobe’s latest research shows nearly 50% of U.S. consumers actively search on TikTok, and that number has jumped almost 20% in just two years. This is a structural shift. People aren’t just scrolling. They’re also searching: → Recipes → Beauty advice → Product reviews → Restaurant recommendations That’s bottom-of-funnel behavior happening inside a content feed. Yes, Google is still larger overall. But TikTok owns something different: Discovery through people. Search on TikTok isn’t keyword-first, but creator-first. You don’t get ten blue links. You get someone showing you. And this is exactly why TikTok Shop makes so much sense. If users are already searching for: “best sunscreen for oily skin” “Dubai chocolate bar review” “best jeans for tall girls” The next logical step is: Tap → Add to cart → Buy. Without leaving the app. Search behavior evolved first. Commerce just naturally followed. That’s the important part. If nearly half of U.S. consumers already treat TikTok like a search engine, then there is no reason to think TikTok Shop is experimental.

TikTok is rarely the first platform that comes to mind when discussing OSINT. Yet in recent years, it has emerged as a space where critical information can surface, often faster than traditional media or government reporting. From conflict zones to scam exposés, TikTok is increasingly being examined not just as entertainment but as an investigative environment. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine offers one of the clearest examples of TikTok’s OSINT potential. In the early days of the war, users across Belarus and Western Russia uploaded footage of military convoys moving toward the border. TikTok’s algorithm amplified these clips, making them discoverable even to those outside the platform. Analysts and independent researchers geolocated several of these videos using visual cues, road signs, vehicle markings, and skyline features, confirming that an invasion was imminent days before official confirmation. But TikTok’s relevance isn’t limited to geopolitics. The platform also hosts a growing genre of “scammer call-out” content, where creators expose fraudulent schemes, fake investments, or phishing operations. While some of this is performative, investigators can extract genuine insights, including voice samples, digital infrastructure, and behavioural patterns, that feed into broader cybercrime mapping. From an OSINT perspective, TikTok offers several advantages: - High volume of user-generated content from a wide demographic - Fast-moving trends that reveal emerging narratives or incidents - Visual material rich in clues: signage, weather, clothing, accents, timestamps However, it also presents clear limitations: - Lack of accessible metadata and GPS information - Volatile content subject to takedown or manipulation - Algorithmic curation that favours sensationalism over substance Difficulty verifying authenticity due to filters, edits, and performance culture But solutions are emerging. One is FaceCheck.ID, a facial recognition tool that has reportedly scraped and indexed TikTok video thumbnails for biometric cross-referencing. While controversial, it reflects the direction in which some digital surveillance capabilities are headed, particularly when anonymity is weak and facial presence is constant. For those addressing TikTok’s ephemeral nature, investigators increasingly use tools such as SSSTik, SnapTik, or SaveFrom.net to download / archive videos before they vanish. Combined with tools like InVID, SunCalc, GeoSpy, or cross-platform social pivots, TikTok clips can serve as viable entry points for deeper investigative chains. TikTok should not be treated as a conclusive source, but as a discovery layer, a way to surface leads, identify emerging trends, and observe how individuals or groups attempt to frame their own visibility. It also speaks to a broader shift: Entertainment spaces have become early warning systems.