Advancing Affiliate Marketing
Staff User-Generated Content Wins
Supercharging Live Commerce
Trend Trackers & Diagnostic Dashboards
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.
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.
Summary
Advancing Affiliate Marketing | 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. |
Staff User-Generated Content Wins | 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. |
Supercharging Live Commerce | 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. |
Trend Trackers & Diagnostic Dashboards | 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. |
Evolving the Social Media Sell


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Want to see the full report?
Offering access to over 350 consumer and cross-industry reports annually, Stylus Membership is your window to tomorrow’s most exciting opportunities.
We already arm more than 500 of the world’s most forward-thinking brands and agencies with the creative insights they need to make transformative business decisions.
We’d love to do the same for you.
Book a demo with us today to discover more.