The short-form video app TikTok should be familiar to just about every social media user, especially in times of quarantine. Increasingly, we see influencers providing us with TikTok content on an almost daily basis via established social media channels. But it's not just this group that seems to be using TikTok intensively. The app is particularly popular among the younger generation. Billions of users are singing along to chart hits, moving to the music and adding visual filters and effects to their videos. But why has TikTok become so popular? And what makes it so successful?
Let's start at the beginning...
If reading the previous sentences made you think of the Musical.ly stars Lisa and Lena, you would be right. Launched in 2014, the American app Musical.ly merged in 2018 with the app TikTok (known as "Douyin" in China), which had been available since 2016, after being acquired by the Chinese company Bytedance for around $800 million. Musical.ly disappeared and the short video platform TikTok, as we know it today, conquered the global market.
After its launch, the platform reached 1 billion users worldwide within three years - faster than any other social media app before it.
Of course, it should be noted that the merger of the two major platforms has already attracted a large number of users in advance (as can be seen from the slight curve in the graph), especially in the American and Chinese markets, which are "added up" here. Nevertheless, TikTok's curve is alarmingly steep compared to the other platforms. It should also be noted that Facebook and Instagram are closed to the Chinese population by government regulations - so TikTok is the main digital medium for social interaction for many Chinese, as well as a way to access the rest of the world.
Still, TikTok's numbers are remarkable. With 33 million downloads, the video platform was already the most downloaded app in the Apple App Store in the first quarter of 2019, and currently has more than 1.5 billion downloads in the Apple and Google stores worldwide - that's about 1/5 of the entire global population.
Young people between the ages of 16 and 24 - especially young women - are particularly active users, spending up to 52 minutes a day on the platform and watching more than 150 videos.
But what does this mean in practice?
If we look at the use of the platform as a communication tool, we can see:
Both the total number of downloads, the number of users and the time they spend on the platform are on a scale that other channels can only dream of. But how do these huge numbers come about? More specifically, what makes TikTok so successful?
Success factor - reach
As TikTok itself publishes little to no information about the reach available on the platform, TOWA undertook fieldwork and a practical test. Identical short videos with congruent hashtags were published on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok and compared after 24 hours on the basis of the number of views. Although the field test is not entirely representative due to the number of videos and their content, a clear and interesting result emerged: the videos published on TikTok generated more than 8 times as many views as those published on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
Even though the test is not fully representative due to the number of videos and their content, it showed a clear and interesting result: The videos published on TikTok generated more than 8 times as many views as those on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
Although the test is not entirely representative due to the number of videos and their content, the result is clear and interesting: the videos published on TikTok generated more than 8 times as many views as those published on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
Success factor - distribution
Another strategically important reason why TikTok has such a large user base is the platform's ability to distribute content. While the major social media platform players tend to be restrictive when it comes to integrating other platforms into their channel, the opposite is true for TikTok. Content developed on TikTok can easily be used on other social media channels - for example, more than 32 million posts have been made on Instagram using the hashtag #tiktok, suggesting that a similar number of TikTok videos have found their way onto the Instagram platform. This is a huge advantage for influencers and therefore for TikTok itself. Influencers can attract their existing followers to TikTok or to their TikTok profile.
Account profiles are another example of the openness of the platform. Here, TikTok allows direct links to other platforms on which the person is also active. In the world of Facebook, it would be unthinkable to allow a link to Snapchat.
Success factor - target group
In terms of content, TikTok is aimed at those who have "seen it all", clearly defining a young and internet-savvy audience that already has a profile on all the other social platforms.
"Enter, touch, scroll, watch" - the platform's appeal to this young, impatient generation. The platform's (and other successful platforms') recipe for success seems to be to first inspire young women. After all, as Sascha Lobo noted in his 2014 article "Young Girls Rule the Internet", it is primarily female teenagers who decide which new features will catch on and which will not. Young women use social media platforms significantly more than other user groups - Facebook, for example, was driven by the demands of young, predominantly female, heavy users. They are quicker to get excited about technology trends, which then spill over to other groups in society. Looking at TikTok, these findings seem to hold true 6 years later - suggesting that communication tends to follow similar mechanisms regardless of the platform and time period.
Conclusion
The previous article showed why the short video app TikTok is currently experiencing such a boom. It is a platform that is conquering the global market and attracting countless users, mainly due to its extremely high organic reach, its combined content distribution channels and its specific targeting. But how is TikTok different from other social media channels? What rules does the algorithm follow and does it make sense to consider TikTok as a communication tool for entrepreneurs? - Find out in our next blog post.
Manuel Kuhn
Partner
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