Affiliate marketing (selling via influencers or customer advocates) is evolving fast. Key new tactics from leading social media technologists include co-branded e-commerce pages customised by influencers, artificial intelligence (AI) tools vetting influencers and brand advocates and brand-backed influencer hubs cultivating competitive influencer communities.

As videos created by brands’ own employees drive a nine times higher conversion rate compared with standard influencer content (Firework, 2025), smart brands are turning their staff into stars. Key strategies and tools include ‘frenemy’ collabs (rival brands temporarily buddying up, a trend we’ve been tracking for some time), store-spotlighting social content, pop culture-fluent brand raps, decentralised social comms and an AI tool for checking that content meets brand guidelines.

Already popular in Asia-Pacific (accounting for 66% of the global market in 2024), livestream commerce is poised to surge in the west: by 2026, livestream sales in the US are expected to reach $68bn, up by 36% from 2023 (Statista, 2024). Key growth areas include idol-fronted shopping events, Twitch beautytainment, TikTok Shop impulse purchases (it’s now the fourth-biggest beauty retailer in the UK) and luxury resales.

Fresh tools are helping brands to demystify and navigate social media commerce, enabling them to pinpoint exactly when, where and how to enter the conversation, particularly on TikTok. From comment analyser ‘vibe checks’ to dashboards that combine social and search data for a 360° view on rising trends, we reveal what every brand should have in its arsenal.