Why should companies in Italy use TikTok? That is the subject of this TikTok Academy lesson. We will start with what TikTok is and why it matters in Italy, then give you everything you need on how to use TikTok for business, marketing and communication.
If you are new here, take a look at the earlier lessons — we have covered several subjects that will help you understand the TikTok world and what we discuss in this article.
If this lesson caught your eye, it is probably because you are not quite sure what TikTok is and whether it can be useful for marketing and brand awareness. So let’s not waste any more time and get started.
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What is TikTok?
TikTok is a popular app used mainly by Millennials and Generation Z for creating, editing and sharing short 15-second videos and stories of up to 60 seconds made by joining two or more clips.
On TikTok, users (tiktokers or musers) can follow other users, like or comment on their videos and share their own videos to other social media. Unlike apps such as YouTube, Snapchat or Vine, it also offers duets with other users and other well-liked forms of collaboration.
The app belongs to the Chinese tech company ByteDance, which also runs a China-only version of TikTok known as “Douyin“. Since buying and merging Musical.ly into it in 2018, TikTok has seen rapid success and drawn real interest, particularly from brands in various sectors whose target audience is 13 to 35 year olds.
The app can be downloaded from both the Apple Store and the Google Play Store.
Free image from Pixabay
TikTok’s growth, reach and use
According to The Verge, TikTok is now worth more than 75 billion on the market, overtaking Uber in the ranking of leading tech startups. The app is available in Asia, the USA and 155 other markets, in 75 languages (Apptrace, 2019).
Globally, China — under the name Douyin — remains the country with the strongest growth (150 million). The app is also growing substantially in other Asian countries such as Cambodia, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.
In India, whose users make up 43% of TikTok’s base, the first quarter of 2019 alone brought 88.6 million new users, while the USA recorded +13.2% over the same period.
On Europe, useful information comes from a pitch deck about TikTok Ads’ early tests in the USA and Europe, reported at the end of 2018 by Digiday and picked up in part by TechCrunch.
According to that report, the main European markets are Germany and France, with 4.1 million and 4 million monthly active users respectively and video views averaging 6.5 and 5 billion. Next come the United Kingdom with 3.7 million users (and 5 billion video views), Spain with 2.7 million users (and 3 billion video views) and Italy with over 2.4 million users (and 3 billion video views).
The pitch deck also tells us that in the UK, France and Germany TikTok users open the app an average of 8 times a day. British musers spend the most time on the app (41 minutes a day), followed closely by the French (40 minutes), Germans (39 minutes), Italians (34 minutes) and Spanish (31 minutes). On gender, women use the app more in all five countries, with the trend strongest in Italy and Spain.
Want your TikTok profile to take off?
Want to land collaborations on TikTok?
Want to grow your TikTok followers?
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Want to turn your TikTok around?
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Why companies in Italy should use TikTok
TikTok grew quickly worldwide thanks to an effective global marketing strategy, funding from the largest venture capital firms and its knack for pulling in tiktokers and influencers and building engagement.
At first, given how young the audience was and the kind of content on it, brands and professionals did not even consider the platform for marketing. Today, in Italy too, that is starting to change.
The app is changing as well: it is now aiming at educational content in the near future, investing in language courses and videos on fitness and maths.
Let’s go through some of the reasons companies in Italy should start using TikTok.
It is a successful app
TikTok is a successful app, and that success comes down to many factors, which we covered in another lesson: “Why TikTok is so successful”.
TikTok’s success can also be measured in these statistics:
- 66% of users are under 30
- TikTok is more popular on Android than on iOS
- 29% of monthly users open TikTok every day
- 80% of TikTok sessions are on Android devices
- In-app purchases rose 275% year on year
- TikTok had already been downloaded more than 660 million times in 2018
- Users generally spend around 52 minutes a day on the app
- More than 500 million people worldwide use TikTok every month, which puts it ninth among the major social networks, ahead of better-known platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat
- 26.5 million of those 500 million monthly active users are in the United States
- Back in 2018 TikTok passed a billion monthly downloads across the Apple Store and Google Play Store
A growing audience (users and age)
When an app draws this much attention, companies end up setting up a presence on it. Their arrival always pushes the average user age up.
ByteDance does not publish audience data, but Google Trends is a good proxy. Worldwide and in Italy alike, interest in TikTok keeps rising. Google Trends data shows global interest in TikTok already level with Snapchat.
Image from Hootsuite
A story like other successful brands
The story of every successful social app looks much the same. It starts as an app with few features and few users and brands. Growth comes from offering advanced features to professionals, organisations and companies for testing; if the app succeeds (as TikTok is doing now), those early movers end up with a competitive advantage in followers and brand awareness.
TikTok today could be compared to YouTube in its early days. The famous streaming platform was born in California in 2005 out of an idea by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, and the first content uploaded to it was “Me at the zoo”, an 18-second video showing its author, Jawed Karim, in front of an elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo in California.
High organic reach
Organic reach — the unpaid kind — is still very high, unlike apps such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and others, where it keeps declining in favour of paid reach.
The decline in views and interactions on posts published by company Facebook pages, for instance, began in 2014, but became sharper in 2018, partly because of a change to the news feed algorithm. The Facebook ecosystem is also increasingly crowded, which makes organic reach ever harder to come by.
On TikTok, by contrast, professionals and brands find themselves in a system that is not yet saturated and that has every reason to favour organic reach. TikTok Ads are still in testing and only now starting to take hold in the US and European markets.
How it differs from other apps
TikTok differs from competing apps in that it allows users, and brands, more creativity and brings new, unique features. Among them are editing tools for trimming, joining and duplicating clips easily, and adding music or sounds free of charge, along with transitions and other special and virtual effects.
How do brands use TikTok as a marketing tool?
Off the back of its rapid growth and popularity, many brands have started looking at TikTok as a new marketing channel and copying the strategies of companies already there. The main examples come from the US market; let’s go through a few.
Guess
Guess was also the first brand to launch a challenge that went viral. It invited US app users to take part in the #InMyDenim contest. Tiktokers had to create videos wearing the new jeans line and use the brand’s hashtag.
Despite not having experimented much with video, Guess showed how a challenge on a highly visual platform like TikTok can spread brand awareness quickly and push people to find out more about a brand or buy one of its products.
Chipotle
Chipotle is a popular Mexican restaurant chain that has run very original video advertising on TikTok. In the #oneyearofTikTok post, a video shows tortilla chips arranged around a bowl of guacamole with Adele’s “Someone Like You” over the clip, so that the chips appear to be singing to the salsa (watch the video).
For National Avocado Day (31 July 2019) Chipotle ran a TikTok challenge under the hashtag #GuacDance. The musical video ad carried the caption “TFW guac is free” over The Guacamole Song. Users were invited to show off their “guac dance”, and anyone buying guac through the Chipotle app or online got an extra one. Within a week it had become the best-performing brand challenge on TikTok to date.
This video ad is an excellent example of how a brand can use a well-loved song or cultural reference to promote its product. Getting a challenge to go viral can be hard, but publishing or encouraging one that involves your products can help spread brand awareness. It also lets you engage potential new fans in an interesting way.
Washington Post
The Washington Post was one of the first to use TikTok and, surprisingly, uses its account to publish comic behind-the-scenes videos and newsroom sketches. Only occasionally do the posts include news and quotes.
These videos fit the platform perfectly because they are funny, musical and use some of TikTok’s oddest special effects. With them the prestigious American paper wants to attract younger readers who want to follow the news but hold back for fear its content is too advanced or too dated for them.
By showing, tongue in cheek, the real and trustworthy people behind hard journalism, the paper hopes young readers will trust it and pick it as a news source. For a media brand or an academic institution, showing a less intellectual side through TikTok videos is a strategy worth testing to catch a young audience’s attention.
The UN’s IFAD
IFAD (the International Fund for Agricultural Development) at the United Nations is an organisation working to fight world hunger by promoting rural agriculture. Through an app like TikTok, IFAD also wants to build awareness of its cause among a young audience.
Its approach combines informative posts and motivational videos that optimistically encourage viewers to change the world. The videos on the app are high-quality short films of people farming around the world. That lets viewers learn how agriculture works and why supporting it could solve world hunger.
With the #danceforchange challenge the organisation encouraged its audience to film themselves dancing using the hashtag in the caption. In the more informative posts, IFAD publishes high-quality short films of people farming around the world, so viewers learn how agriculture works and why supporting it could solve world hunger.
Watching IFAD’s strategy could be useful for companies or organisations in the public, legal or financial sectors. While it may seem inappropriate or unnatural to make entertaining videos about a difficult subject, filming short stories or starting a challenge that encourages people to learn something connected to your mission can be very effective.
Free image from Pixabay
Useful TikTok tips
Here are some useful tips for advertising on TikTok:
- Show a different side of your company. The app is known for creative, humorous content, and a more personal tone or a behind-the-scenes approach could make your company feel more reliable and trustworthy to potential customers.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment. There are no fixed rules or best practices for what works and what doesn’t. If you think something could be interesting or funny, try it and see whether it gets likes, comments or shares.
- Interact with your audience. Challenges, duets, likes, comments and shares — there are plenty of ways to engage with other TikTok users. Try coming up with videos, challenges or duets aimed at interacting with others, even people you don’t know. As on other platforms, the more you interact with people, the more your fan base can grow.
- Even if TikTok doesn’t interest you right now, we suggest keeping an eye on the app. It may be too niche for you at the moment, but its videos could help you brainstorm original ideas of your own or show you how other companies are experimenting with new platforms.
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite TikTok Academy we covered why companies in Italy should use TikTok. You now have everything you need to understand what TikTok is and to judge whether to use it as a marketing channel.
Stay tuned and keep following us: in the next TikTok Academy lessons we will go deeper and cover other very interesting things…
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