Social media growth strategies to boost DAUs

Customer service is a decisive piece of brand loyalty, as 96% of consumers say it’s an important loyalty driver.³ However, creator support often lags, with many creators dissatisfied with issue resolution on their main platform.⁴ To address this, platforms should proactively resolve creator pain points by analyzing support journeys and metrics like time-to-support and drop-off rates. How is your employee training reflecting this targeted, effective intervention with a human touch?

By adopting next-gen customer relationship management and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, platforms can streamline the process. Balancing self-service with personalization not only reduces operational cost and can resolve issues faster but increases loyalty. A well-supported creator is more likely to stay with a platform, strengthening long-term brand preference and platform reputation.⁵

Fragmentation across channels, formats, and platforms is prompting creators to diversify, with the average creator using three platforms to generate income.⁶ While this expands reach, juggling two or more content channels often results in burnout and diminished creativity.⁷ Sustainable growth requires platforms to clearly showcase their value and define loyalty as an ongoing agreement with creators.

By understanding what motivates creators—through both qualitative and quantitative segment-specific research—platforms can tailor compensation, community, and support to build lasting loyalty throughout the creator journey. It’s essential for platforms to continuously gather feedback and use analytics to refine their offerings.

When platforms balance networking opportunities for emerging creators and premium support for experienced ones,⁸ platforms see a diverse array of benefits. It does more than strengthen satisfaction and enhance brand reputation; the differentiated engagement and broad partnership models position them as a preferred space for creators to share content.

A core objective of a social platform is to connect creators with users, especially in an era of hyper-niche content and audiences. Notably, 73% of brands prefer to work with micro and mid-tier creators for their strong engagement-to-cost ratio.⁹ But that doesn’t happen on its own. What are you doing to segment creators and strategically tailor resources?

One way to get your arms around this is to define creator lifetime value (CLTV)—the total value a creator generates over time. This enables platforms to differentiate, segment, and support clusters of creators with relevant tools and models. Our developed CLTV solutions can help drive higher CLTV and reduce churn by leveraging first-party and third-party data and personalized offers.

Net-net? Creators should feel like they’re business partners. So, platforms should facilitate brand partnerships, offer campaign-trend matching, and provide AI-enabled resources suited to increase CLTV. And conversely, identifying and supporting creator segments with the higher ROI facilitates alignment with platform values and long-term growth.

Amid the surge of available content and increased competition for users’ attention, creators face mounting pressure to deliver quality, timely, and relevant content. With 27% of content creators spending 5 to 10 hours per week on content production—and 16% spending 10 to 20 hours¹⁰—platforms have a significant opportunity to add to their creators’ capacity through AI: Nearly 80% of creators believe generative AI (GenAI) will ease their workload, and 82% said it will accelerate their content creation process.¹¹

To realize this potential, platforms should collaborate closely with creators to understand unique workflows and iterate on tools that integrate effectively. Our research shows creators are most open to GenAI for behind-the-scenes activities, like trend suggestions or editing. An agile, adaptive approach allows platforms to keep pace with technology and creator needs, simplify workflows, and enhance creative outputs.

Discovery is the growth engine—for creators, it’s the difference between “posted” and “found.” Recommendations reportedly drive 70% of video views,¹² yet around 52% of creators cite algorithm unpredictability as their biggest challenge.¹³ Therefore, platforms should treat discovery as a creator priority with transparent diagnostics, scenario-based coaching, and “content-to-audience” matching that rewards consistency.

Creators don’t just publish content—they run relationship businesses. Communities help them scale and reduce burnout: 87% of creators value having a fan community,¹⁴ and 52% have experienced burnout (37% have even considered leaving the profession).¹⁵ Platforms can help creators thrive with key features, such as structured collaboration, safer comment controls, and tools that turn superfans into moderators, all of which can boost retention and repeat engagement.

A healthy creator infrastructure requires trust. But creators regularly have to absorb harassment, impersonation, brand-safety risks, and revenue volatility. And their communities feel it, too: 22% of Americans reported experiencing severe online harassment in the past 12 months, with physical threats rising.¹⁶ Regulation is raising the bar and platforms who pay attention to compliance help creators deal with fewer bad actors and experience more predictable growth. So, we recommend that platforms make trust measurable and actionable with: identity protection, detection of impersonation and doxxing, clear enforcement receipts, and safety-by-design defaults.

Advertiser demand fuels creator models but concentrates where platforms prove performance and protect brand equity. US creator ad spend was projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, a 26% year-over-year increase and growing roughly 4x faster than media overall,¹⁷ with heightened ROI scrutiny. As tier strategy evolves, 44% of brands prefer to work with nano-influences (1K-10K followers).¹⁸ Platforms can operationalize demand via matching, campaign analytics, vertical specialization, and benchmarking—turning episodic brand deals into repeatable revenue.

Creator income is increasingly multi-stream by necessity, not preference. 75% of top-earning creators say multiple revenue streams are crucial;¹⁹ diversification hedges algorithm volatility, seasonal brand budgets, and platform policy shifts. Platforms that don’t operationalize monetization risk losing creators to ecosystems supporting subscriptions, commerce, affiliate revenue, and brand discovery. An integrated earnings stack—including native subscriptions, tipping, affiliates, storefront integration, and brand matchmaking—reduces the concentration of risk and increases lifetime creator value.

Regulation is becoming a product constraint and a creator trust lever including: EU expectations under the Digital Services Act²⁰, UK Ofcom requirements on illegal harms and child safety,²¹ and accelerating synthetic-media transparency via the European Commission’s 2025-2026 Code of Practice for AI Act labeling.²² For creators, compliance can shape monetization. Platforms can help protect creator income by responding with plain-language rules, pre-publish checks, monetization-safe toolkits, and faster redress.