TikTok is the subject of this lesson. What is TikTok and how does it work? How can I use it for marketing? Why has TikTok mattered as a social network since 2019? How can it give a brand visibility? And much more — there is plenty to cover.
In our TikTok Academy we cover every subject related to this well-known social network. This is the first lesson and there are many more worth reading.
If this lesson caught your eye, it is probably because you want to understand what TikTok is and how it works so you can use it as an individual or as a brand.
Let’s get started.
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What is TikTok?
TikTok is one of the most popular and interesting emerging social media apps and is available on Android and iOS. Through this Chinese app, users (known as “musers” or “tiktokers“) can create and share short 15-second videos called TikTok lives (or “live moments”), or join clips into stories of up to 60 seconds.
TikTok is now a short video streaming platform available in 150 markets and 75 languages. The TikTok app still keeps a China-only version, known as “Douyin“, whose logo came out of combining those of Musical.ly and Douyin.
Recently the company has been running tests aimed at selling advertising space and earning through internet marketing. Its plans also include using the app as a platform for educational content, and it is currently investing in language courses and videos on fitness and maths.
On other investments, The Information reported back in December 2018 that ByteDance would invest 1.45 billion dollars in artificial intelligence and media content.
How does TikTok work?
People can sign up to TikTok with a phone number, an email address, a Facebook profile or an Instagram profile. Once logged in, musers can browse videos by “category” or “most popular creators”, by hashtag, or check which of their contacts are on the app.
Like other apps and social networks, tiktokers can follow other users, like or comment on other people’s videos and share their own videos to other social media.
What makes it so popular, above all among Generation Z and unlike apps such as Snapchat or Vine, is its algorithm.
TikTok’s algorithm gives the user a huge database of songs, effects and sounds that are easy to edit, which widens what they can do creatively. You can shoot videos in slow motion, time-lapse or fast forward, or even play a song backwards.
The ability to “duet” by connecting with another user and syncing the audio has driven collaborations on TikTok up enormously and made binge-watching — consuming content back to back without stopping — hard to resist.
Want your TikTok profile to take off?
Want to land collaborations on TikTok?
Want to grow your TikTok followers?
Want to make money on TikTok?
Want to turn your TikTok around?
We can help.
TikTok & Musical.ly: origins and differences
Musical.ly is an app launched in China in 2014 by two entrepreneurs, Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. The idea was to bring music and video together in a social network aimed at a specific audience: teenagers. In 2017 the app was bought by the tech company ByteDance, which had owned TikTok since 2016, and merged into it the following year.
After that merger only TikTok remained (go to the official site).
While they were separate, the two apps were built on the same short-video idea and were alike in many ways, but there were differences too. Unlike Musical.ly, TikTok did not focus only on lip sync. The main difference was that TikTok allowed more creativity and brought in new, unique features.
TikTok features
TikTok gives its users a set of features, including these:
- emoji stickers and face filters;
- editing tools for trimming, joining and duplicating video clips easily;
- ready-made videos (dance, magic tricks, comedy, vlogs, sport, DIY, animals) to work with;
- adding music or sounds to your videos free of charge, from a wide selection of sounds and song clips;
- adding transitions, special and virtual effects and filters to videos, with designs constantly refreshed;
- recording your reactions to videos and sharing them;
- the app warns users when they have spent more than 2 hours on it.
TikTok’s growth and reach
The TikTok app has been widely popular since launch, and that popularity soon spread beyond its home market. In September 2018 TikTok was the most downloaded media app in the world in a single month on the Apple Store (more than a billion times).
The app overtook household names such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Dubsmash and others. Worried by its rapid growth, Facebook launched a new app, Lasso, last November.
It is also worth remembering that monthly active users on TikTok now pass 500 million.
That success made ByteDance the first Chinese internet company to build a significant following outside its own borders. According to The Verge, this rapid growth also let it overtake Uber as the world’s most valuable tech startup (more than 75 billion dollars).
Image from influencermarketinghub.com
Is TikTok safe?
Like any other social network with a particularly young audience, TikTok sees episodes of inappropriate behaviour by adults. By default accounts are public, so anyone on the app can see what you share. It is easy enough to set the account to private, though that limits what you can do.
The company has done a good deal about this, including drawing up community guidelines, but much more will have to be done to resolve safety issues for those aged 13 and over.
It also instructed a major US law firm to head off problems around children’s privacy — this after ByteDance was found guilty in February 2019 and fined for illegally collecting personal data from children under 13.
TikTok & marketing strategy
Beyond how easy it is to create, share and watch video content, an effective marketing strategy played a major part in the app’s growth and worldwide popularity.
That included paid partnerships with celebrities around the world, who not only posted content on the app but promoted TikTok on other social media too. ByteDance used celebrities and influencers to build curiosity around the app and generate viral content.
Another effective strategy was creating content tied to a local trending topic. The app ran a contest, “1 million audition“, in different parts of the world, and in each one the winning entry was a locally themed video made by a tiktoker.
Sending personalised recommendations to tiktokers then made sure they always knew the latest trending videos, which kept production up.
TikTok as a marketing tool?
Off the back of its rapid growth and popularity, many brands started to look at TikTok as a new marketing channel and copied the strategies. Guess, for instance, invited app users in the USA to take part in the #InMyDenim contest.
Tiktokers had to create videos wearing their jeans and use the brand’s hashtag. Another route brands take is partnerships with celebrities and collaborations with influencers.
Alan Walker, the music producer and DJ, used the app to help sales of his well-known track “Different World”. He launched a challenge on TikTok with the hashtag #DifferentWorld, inviting fans to do something to defend the environment, and won an award for it. The #DifferentWorld hashtag now has around 106 million views.
That said, ByteDance has not yet built a profitable system (though it will soon) and only started testing its own advertising format with web agencies in the USA and Europe in January 2019.
Conclusion
In this first lesson of what is surely already your favourite TikTok Academy we covered TikTok and gave you everything you need to understand exactly what TikTok is and how it works.
Stay tuned and keep following us: in the next TikTok Academy lessons we will go deeper and cover other very interesting things…
Want TikTok consultancy? Get in touch — we will work out the best strategy for reaching your goal.
Want to sharpen your TikTok knowledge? Get in touch — we will find the course that fits you.
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