Why is TikTok so successful? That is what we will look at in this lesson. We will start with what TikTok is, follow TikTok’s growth over time and finish by setting out all the reasons TikTok took off.
As you know, in the TikTok Academy we cover every subject related to the TikTok social network. If you are new here, take a look at the earlier lessons — we have covered several TikTok subjects that will help you follow this article.
Let’s not waste any more time and get started.
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What is TikTok?
TikTok is currently the most popular app among Millennials and Generation Z for creating, editing and sharing short videos. Known as TikTok lives (or live moments), the videos created by users, or tiktokers, run for 15 seconds. Clips can be joined into stories of up to 60 seconds.
If you have never heard of this app, it is worth a few minutes to get to know it. Back in 2018 TikTok passed a billion monthly downloads across the Apple Store and Google Play Store, and today it competes successfully with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and others in this segment.
Free to use image from Google Image
TikTok’s growth and reach
Launched in 2018 by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, the app is now available in Asia, the USA and 155 other markets, in 75 languages, through the Apple Store and Google Play Store.
TikTok grew quickly and has now passed 500 million monthly active users. ByteDance itself, as The Verge reported, is now the world’s most valuable private tech company at more than 75 billion dollars.
That was made possible by the integration of TikTok with the well-known lip sync app Musical.ly, an effective global marketing strategy and funding from the largest venture capital firms. TikTok’s success shows up in these statistics.
500 million monthly active users
TikTok, as noted above, has more than 500 million active users (Datareportal, 2019), which puts it ninth among the major social networks, ahead of better-known platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat. The strongest growth came in China (150 million), where it is known as Douyin, and to varying degrees in other Asian countries (Cambodia, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam).
More than 1 billion downloads
In the first quarter of 2019 TikTok was the third most downloaded app, with 188 million new users. User growth against the same period in 2018 was +70%. The biggest contributors were India (+88.6 million new users) and the USA (+13.2).
Image from Hootsuite
A steep growth curve
In the USA 26.5 million people use the app and, apart from a dip in the third quarter of 2018, the number of American tiktokers has grown steadily in recent years (Marketingcharts, 2019). The same study found that in less than 18 months their number in the United States grew 5.5 times over. User numbers are also growing fast in Asia and India. In Vietnam alone the app was downloaded more than 10 million times last year, while India now has over 20 million active users.
Number one in the Apple Store
With 33 million downloads, TikTok was the most downloaded app of the first quarter of 2019 on the Apple Store (Sensor Tower, 2019), ahead of the better-known YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. In the Google Play Store the app came third, behind WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
One of the apps young people love
The app was built to hit a specific audience: people under 18. No surprise, then, that 41 per cent of TikTok users today are aged between 16 and 24 (Globalwebindex, 2019). According to App Ape Lab’s 2018 report, the app is used more by boys (55.6%) than girls (44.4%). Worth noting from the same report: many users open the app to watch videos rather than make them.
Long sessions
This figure matters to marketers too, since longer sessions mean users are likely to see more ads. People spend an average of 52 minutes a day on the app (BusinessofApps, 2019).
Compared with other social media, time spent on the app is in line with Instagram (53 minutes) and Snapchat (49.5 minutes). At an average of 58.5 minutes a day, Facebook still leads.
Frequent use
90% of all TikTok users open the app every day. Watching tiktokers’ behaviour over a one-month period also showed that users are highly active. Around 68% of TikTok users watch someone else’s video and 55% upload their own, while just as many share them with other users.
Image from blog.globalwebindex.com
More than 1 million video views a day
According to a 2018 post from Influencer Marketing Hub collecting 37 TikTok statistics, the app had already reached a million video views a day in its first year.
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.
Why is TikTok so successful?
There are many reasons TikTok has been, and remains, such a success. Here are some of them:
- TikTok has features that not only make it fun and easy to use, but above all widen users’ creativity. Beyond syncing music with video (lip sync), the app lets you add transitions, sounds and song clips, special and virtual effects and filters whose design is constantly refreshed. It also lets users record their reactions to videos and share them
- The video quality is very high and the videos are carefully made. The main reason for the app’s success, though, is that it is an entertainment platform rather than a lifestyle one. Young people love making this kind of content and their enthusiasm and creativity keep widening the user base.
- The app hosts many niche communities, from music to dance, beauty, sport, fitness, fashion, art, food and comedy — and the list does not stop there.
- The app perfectly matches what young people want, as many studies have shown: a space to express their creativity freely.
- Young people love the challenges, the duets and the other kinds of collaboration between users the app allows.
- Partly because the videos are short, creating, editing and sharing them takes no particular skill or effort.
- With the Musical.ly integration the app went global, yet TikTok leans heavily on localised content. Using locally trending hashtags to suggest content ideas to its users has proved a very effective strategy.
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite TikTok Academy we covered why TikTok is so successful. As you have seen, there are many reasons behind this platform’s success and behind the interest it has drawn from brands and marketers.
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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