Perhaps you’ve been waiting for TikTok to fade away and be replaced by the next “it” app. You expected it to follow in the footsteps of Vine, Meerkat, and Musical.ly. Being wary of “the next big thing” is understandable for social media marketers who are most likely already tapped with content strategies for Facebook Lives, tweet threads, Stories, and Snaps–but you might want to join TikTok now because it isn’t going away anytime soon. This is why:
TikTok has surpassed Instagram as the most downloaded app.
TikTok has consistently ranked as one of the most downloaded apps in the world since its launch in 2018. TikTok finally surpassed Facebook as the most downloaded app globally and in the United States in 2020. While it has a reputation for being a “Gen Z” space, 53 percent of TikTok users in America are 30 years or older, which is similar to Twitter’s user demographic.
It’s not just the app’s popularity that’s noteworthy. TikTok users spend more time per month on the platform than Facebook users do. TikTok is a primary source of information and entertainment for its users. It’s as sticky, if not more so, than Facebook is now. That’s quite amazing.
Why Are People Joining TikTok?
TikTok connects a social network with a television network. TikTok, which serves up very short video clips in an endless stream, evolved into a more social version of video streaming, displacing other forms of entertainment such as TV time.
Users are actively engaging with videos they see on feeds and the For You Page (FYP), with a whopping 92 percent of users taking action after watching TikTok videos. Impressively, a quarter of TikTok users buy or research products immediately after watching TikTok videos–and that immediacy is novel for marketers who are used to the difficulty of assigning attribution for social content.
TikTok users believe that the platform’s ads are more appealing than those on other social networks, and as a result, they are more likely to engage or follow up.
What Sets TikTok Apart?
TikTok can be thought of as a social media kaleidoscope.
While it appears, feels, and functions like a social network, the user experience is noticeably different from that of other social channels. The differences are what distinguishes TikTok, but they also pose challenges for social media content creators and brand marketers who must learn an entirely new way to create and produce video content.
TikTok allows brand accounts, but they function differently than individual users. When it first began, the content created and published for TikTok was vastly different from that created for other social networks (until Instagram copied it with Reels). Engaging with fans occurs, but in different ways. Measuring and tracking success on TikTok appears to be different as well.
Reach is one of the most important distinctions marketers must be aware of. TikTok is based on an algorithm, but the TikTok algorithm is programmed in a different way than creators are used to. Content is democratized in ways that Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms have never allowed. This is most prevalent on TikTok’s FYP.
Because of the algorithm and how it allows for viral impressions, there is a real possibility for hyper-acceleration for creators. Many TikTok users have a similar story about going from a few to thousands of followers in a matter of hours or with a single video. There are numerous niche communities where brands and creators can start building their presence.
