Is TikTok Right for Your Business?

TikTok has exploded in popularity with 80+ million registered users in the USA and 500 million active users across the globe. The app has become a top ten social media platform and one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, allows users to share short videos, from comedy, to lip-synch battles to their reactions.

The Origins

TikTok was launched in China originally under the name Douyin in 2016 and was expanded out to international markets a year later in 2017. ByteDance bought the highly popular musical.ly app out in 2017, combining functions and merging the two apps, to bring over another 200 million registered users.

Opportunity

Where there are large amounts of users brands will follow for advertising opportunities. TikTok is experimenting with advertisements but it isn’t quite to the level of YouTube’s profit-sharing system yet. The way in which brands advertise within TikTok is by creating hashtag challenges. The company will offer a prize if users upload videos of themselves interacting, singing or dancing using specific music or themes, this will then be uploaded to the brands own page.

This is a smart way for companies to get user-generated content and interaction without having to hire people to make the content. These videos can then be shared on other platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to merge brand awareness across all of their social media.

The most interesting statistic about TikTok for advertisers is that 66% of its users are aged 30 and under. The Millennial and Gen-Z user demographic is one that is notoriously hard to reach with traditional advertising methods.

Football and Food

There are still traditional influencers within TikTok but the most popular ideas for marketing businesses include everyone. The Chinese restaurant Haidilao allowed customers to select a DIY dining experience where they create their own dishes. They then encouraged people to make a video of their process and upload it to their TikTok. This led to over 2,000 videos being uploaded and the menu items becoming very popular with customers recreating dishes they had seen online. These campaigns of user interaction have been so popular that within the USA the NFL signed a multi-year partnership with TikTok, in the hopes of boosting its 18-30-year-old viewership.

If you would like to speak to iperdesign about which Social Media platform would be best for your company, use the Contact Us page.

Statistics via DatarePortal, 2019

Featured Photo by Andrea Piacqadio from Pexels

By Jonathan George