Hive Social - The New Social Media App to Keep on your Marketing Radar

Elon Musk's tumultuous Twitter takeover has prompted millions of users to flee the app into the warm, welcoming arms of alternatives. The search for the next big social media app is now on.

While apps like Mastodon and Tumblr have been floated as contenders over the past few days, interest in one app in particular – Hive Social – seems to have snowballed. Hive Social is now the top social app on Apple's App Store, surpassing even TikTok. It has reached 2 million downloads, with its Twitter account boldly announcing that it just welcomed 1 million ‘besties’ into its vibrant social community.

An app made by the Gen-Z for the Gen-Z audiences, one of its co-founder Raluca Pop was gushing with enthusiasm over the app’s overnight popularity. She estimated that more than 80,000 people created accounts on the app in a single day and acknowledged that "Our servers did crash. We were working frantically on Friday to get them back up."

In contrast to most social media networks, Hive Social is touted to be ad-free and algorithm-ridden with a chronological feed of organic posts. Besides, the app’s interface seems to be a mash-up of Twitter’s informational text posts and Instagram’s photogenic stories, along with a hint of musical nostalgia from MySpace.

Hive also uses the same follower-based model as Twitter, as opposed to the mutual friending model of Facebook. This seems to have won over a large fraction of Twitter deserters looking for a viable alternative.

Hive Social has a lot of progress to make on updating its app and servers to keep up with the influx of new members. However, it’s a social media platform that seems to be worth a look for marketers as well as influencers. Its immense popularity with Gen-Z audiences demonstrates a monumental shift in consumer attitudes toward the current social media landscape.

In a world where most young audiences are looking for transparent, visually engaging, authentic, and socially validated information, Hive seems to tick all the boxes.

Besides, another great thing about this app is that it doesn’t have a pay-to-play model and there’s no need to be familiar with native social algorithms that rank content based on popularity. Marketers can begin marketing immediately upon creating a Hive account and start posting content with links and URLs they want to promote. However, marketers need to focus more on creating non-branded content that adheres to the community guidelines and engage in proactive conversation management practices.

Since the platform is just now gaining momentum, close-knit communities are quickly forming. Influencers from TikTok and Instagram are also migrating and linking their main accounts to their Hive account.

Currently, the anti-twitter sentiment seems to be working in its favor. It needs a bit more time to tell if the app can live up to mainstream expectations and establish a true competitive differentiator that pushes it to the forefront.

In the meanwhile, marketers can keep the app on their digital marketing radar to get a sense of its community vibe and see where the app is headed.