Social media in the fashion industry refers to the use of social media platforms by fashion designers and users to promote and participate in trends. Over the past several decades, the development of social media has increased along with its usage by consumers. The COVID-19 pandemic was a sharp turn of reliance on the virtual sphere for the industry and consumers alike. Social media has created new channels of advertising for fashion houses to reach their target markets. Since its surge in 2009, luxury fashion brands have used social media to build interactions between the brand and its customers to increase awareness and engagement. The emergence of influencers on social media has created a new way of advertising and maintaining customer relationships in the fashion industry. Numerous social media platforms are used to promote fashion trends, with Instagram and TikTok being the most popular among Generation Y and Z. The overall impact of social media in the fashion industry included the creation of online communities, direct communication between industry leaders and consumers, and criticized ideals that are promoted by the industry through social media.
Musixmatch is an Italian music data company and platform for users to search and share song lyrics with translations. Musixmatch has 80 million users, 8 million songs with their respective lyrics, and 115+ employees.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 32 languages including English, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information like recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. Created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, Pinterest, Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco.
Vine was an American short-form video hosting service where users could share up to 10-second-long looping video clips. It was originally launched on January 24, 2013, by Vine Labs, Inc and Big Human. Bought by Twitter, Inc. in 2012 before its launch, the service was shut down on January 17, 2017, and the app was discontinued a few months later.
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Roposo is an Indian video-sharing social media service, owned by Glance, a subsidiary of InMobi. Roposo provides a space where users can share posts related to different topics like food, comedy, music, poetry, fashion and travel. It is a platform where people express visually with homemade videos and photos. The app offers a TV-like browsing experience with user-generated content on its channels. Users can also use editing tools on the platform and upload their content.
TikTok, whose mainland Chinese counterpart is Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from three seconds to 10 minutes. It can be accessed with a smart phone app.
Bigo Live is a global social live streaming platform owned by BIGO Technology based in Singapore, which was founded in 2014 by David Li and Jason Hu. As of 2019, Bigo Technology is owned by JOYY.
Huddles was an American short-form video hosting service and social network where users could create looping videos that are between 2–16 seconds long. It was created by a team led by Dom Hofmann as a successor to Vine, which Hofmann co-founded, until the project was sold to Clash App, Inc. and subsequently renamed.
Many countries have imposed past or ongoing restrictions on the video sharing social network TikTok. Bans from government devices usually stem from national security concerns over potential access of data by the Chinese government. Other bans have cited children's well-being and offensive content such as pornography.
There is evidence that TikTok has down-weighted the posts of topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party. Topics alleged to have been censored by the platform include the Persecution of Uyghurs in China, the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, the Sino-Indian border dispute, foreign political leaders, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and people of African descent. TikTok has also removed or omitted information from its services to comply with company policies, legal demands, and government censorship laws. TikTok's responses to claims of censorship have varied, responding that the platform was attempting to protect users from bullying, arguing that certain instances were the result of human error, and stating that such incidents were the result of algorithmic mistakes.
Josh is a video-sharing social networking service, owned by VerSe Innovation – an Indian technology company based in Bangalore, India. Josh is an Indian short video app that was launched in immediately after the Indian Government banned TikTok and other Chinese apps in June 2020. The founders of the platform have promoted the app as the “Instagram for Bharat” referring to their focus on the Indian audience that speaks its own regional and state languages. Josh was among the top 10 most downloaded apps social and entertainment apps in India of 2021 and had 150 million monthly active users as per April 2022.
YouTube Shorts is the short-form section of the American video-sharing site YouTube. Shorts focuses on vertical videos at a maximum length of 60 seconds and various features for user interaction. As of March 2024, Shorts have collectively earned over 5 trillion views since the platform was made available to the public on July 13, 2021, which include video views that pre-date the YouTube Shorts feature. Creators earn money based on the amount of views they receive, or through ad revenue. The increased popularity of YouTube Shorts has led to concerns about addiction for teenagers.
Ronald "Ronnie" Merle McNutt was a 33-year-old American man and US Army Reserve veteran from New Albany, Mississippi, who committed suicide by shooting himself under his chin on a Facebook livestream, which went viral on various social media platforms due to its inherent shock value.
Sean Solme Kim is a South Korean-American executive. He is best known for his role as head of product at TikTok US. Kim was also an executive at Amazon. Additionally, he is president and chief product officer at Kajabi.
Filters are digital image effects often used on social media. They initially simulated the effects of camera filters, and they have since developed with facial recognition technology and computer-generated augmented reality. Social media filters—especially beauty filters—are often used to alter the appearance of selfies taken on smartphones or other similar devices. While filters are commonly associated with beauty enhancement and feature alterations, there is a wide range of filters that have different functions. From adjusting photo tones to using face animations and interactive elements, users have access to a range of tools. These filters allow users to enhance photos and allow room for creative expression and fun interactions with digital content.
The online video platform TikTok has had worldwide a social, political, and cultural impact since its global launch in September 2017. The platform has rapidly grown its userbase since its launch and surpassed 2 billion downloads in October 2020. It became the world's most popular website, ahead of Google, for the year 2021.
TikTok Shop is an e-commerce feature of the video hosting service TikTok. Launched in November 2022, the feature enables users interested in starting a business and generating income to upload their curated products on TikTok for others to discover. Users have the option to purchase these products, which are available for a price.
