Exclusive: LTK rolls out new social features as it pushes beyond shopping into creator-led entertainment

Founded in 2011 as an affiliate marketing tool for fashion bloggers, LTK — formerly known as LiketoKnow.it — has evolved into a destination for over 350,000 creators and 40 million monthly users, nearly 40% of whom are Gen-Z and millennial women in the U.S. Over the past year, the platform has aggressively repositioned itself as a social app, blending new entertainment and social features with shopping. 

“LTK is very much social in 2025,” said Amber Venz Box, co-founder and president of LTK. “We will continue to make meaningful investments in being a place where real humans can connect with each other.”

The latest updates reflect that strategy. Public profiles let users share their saved posts, favorite creators and product picks via custom URLs, turning LTK into a more collaborative experience among friends. Meanwhile, new threaded commenting in LTK Chat enables creators to hold more direct conversations with followers. 

Search is also getting a visual and AI-powered boost. Users can now upload photos to find similar posts via Visual Search, and the redesigned Discover tab surfaces trending content in real time. 

For creators, the platform is also rolling out backend upgrades. A new “My LTK” preview tab shows how their profile appears to followers, helping them optimize content layout. In addition, LTK is introducing a streamlined payment system with faster direct deposit payouts, part of a broader push to make the app more creator-friendly at a time when rivals like ShopMy are gaining traction with competitive commissions and backend tools, per Digiday. 

Founded in 2020, ShopMy was originally built as a platform for content creators to earn commissions through shoppable links. But ShopMy has since branched out beyond shoppable links by selling tools to brands to help them track the success of influencer campaigns. These days, the majority of ShopMy’s revenue is driven by the company’s subscription-based brand tools.

Similarly, LTK has diversified beyond affiliate marketing. “While affiliate remains a key part of our platform, it’s not the primary driver of traffic. More than half of LTK’s traffic is direct, and not from other platforms. Users are coming straight to LTK to follow creators,” a company spokesperson told Modern Retail in an email statement.

LTK’s recent product updates build on the platform’s consumer app relaunch, announced earlier this year. Since then, LTK’s app has placed a stronger emphasis on video content, allowing users to discover and watch creators’ content in a more social, interest-based feed, closer to the original spirit of TikTok or Instagram Reels, but optimized for shopping. Video content has significantly increased engagement and sales on LTK’s platform. Since LTK relaunched its consumer app earlier this years, users have been spending 138% more time in the app, according to the company. LTK is expected to “eclipse” $6 billion in retail sales this year, Venz Box told Modern Retail, up from $5 billion last year. 

“Consumers are actually buying three to four times more when it’s a piece of video content versus when it’s a static image,” Venz Box said. “They have higher confidence in their purchases when they’re looking at video, and they’re spending more time looking at video.”

That’s helping to attract more advertisers to LTK, as well. 

“Across all metrics, LTK has been up this year, whether it’s engagement, conversion and creator applications,” Venz Box said. “Brands want that conversion. They want that engagement.” Brand spending on LTK is also up year-over-year, she said. 

As TikTok faces a potential ban in the U.S., other social commerce apps like Flip — originally focused on only shoppable videos — have expanded their approach over the past year to include more general entertainment content, not just shopping. Platforms, in general, including Substack and LinkedIn, have also added more videos in recent months.

“These are steps that LTK is taking as it grows into a more fully featured app,” said Sky Canaves, a retail and e-commerce analyst at eMarketer. “Adding more social features like these can increase engagement and time spent on the app, and that, in turn, helps to fuel their social commerce flywheel.”

The social-shopping market presents a major growth opportunity for platforms that can successfully scale their user base. The number of U.S. consumers making purchases through social commerce was expected to reach 100 million in 2024, with total sales projected to surpass $100 billion by 2026, per eMarketer. Meanwhile, investors are pouring tens of millions of dollars into social-commerce startups like Whatnot and ShopMy, capitalizing on their momentum as TikTok’s e-commerce business, Shop, struggles in the U.S. 

LTK plans to announce even more brand, consumer and creator tools at an upcoming conference in September. 

Despite the platform’s increased focus on video and other new social features, Venz Box said LTK’s central ethos — to be a stable platform for creators — remains intact, especially as the possibility of a TikTok ban still looms large. 

“Our mission has always been the same: to make creators as economically successful as possible,” said Venz Box. “But traditional social media has really abandoned this lane, so we’re stepping into it wholeheartedly, really to future-proof our creators’ businesses.”