Video app
IT HAS rejuvenated the music industry and given birth to a new generation of celebrities, including the likes of Charli d鈥橝melio, a 15-year-old social media personality and dancer. More than 3 million people a day downloaded video app TikTok in January, according to tracking company Sensor Tower. Its rise to become one of the big beasts of social media has been remarkable, so how did TikTok do it?
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The app, which people use to share short videos, often accompanied by clips of music, is a modern media phenomenon. The firm sponsored the BRIT awards for music in February, with chart-topping singer Lewis Capaldi as its poster boy. Actors including Will Smith, and music stars like Justin Bieber, also use it.
TikTok鈥檚 parent company ByteDance, based in Beijing, China, bought an advert to promote the app at American Football鈥檚 flagship Super Bowl game, and the Jama Masjid, one of the largest mosques in India, has posted signs outside its door saying 鈥淭ikTok is strictly prohibited鈥� after a video of two women doing a headstand inside its premises went viral.
Some people say its success is down to its brief content. 鈥�TikTok separated themselves brilliantly from the rest, focused on the things they鈥檙e good at and reinvented short-form content when the rest of the world is turning to long form with companies like Netflix,鈥� says Harry Hugo, co-founder of The Goat Agency, a marketing firm. Unlike everything else, the platform 鈥渁llows you to be effortlessly famous in a very short amount of time鈥�, says Hugo. It is also buoyed by the fact that the videos are no more than 60 seconds long, and usually more like 10 or 15, and presented in an endless scroll.
鈥淧eople don鈥檛 have a very long attention span nowadays, so it鈥檚 appropriate the videos are short,鈥� says Anna Bogomolova, who posts content including her dancing to popular songs and performing comedy skits. Bogomolova has 2.3 million followers on the app.
She initially posted on Musical.ly, an app that allowed users to lip-sync to their favourite songs, before it merged into TikTok in August 2018. The change was significant, she says: 鈥淣ow because people are doing dances, comedy, acting or art, everyone else is encouraged to try different things as well.鈥�
This gives it great appeal, says Rich Waterworth, general manager of TikTok in the UK. 鈥淲hat makes TikTok so popular is that the experience is different for everyone: there鈥檚 no one thing that defines it,鈥� he says. 鈥淪o much of what trends on TikTok has become the origin of cultural conversation in the mainstream. Our success lies in capturing moments in the lives of ordinary people, like the farmer at @caenhillcc in rural England, teaching people the ins and outs of agriculture, or self-trained comedian @ameliagething, whose popularity on TikTok landed her a professional career in broadcasting.鈥�
The app is also adding options to make money through a creator marketplace, which connects brands to talent, and in-app advertising.
Since the merger with Musical.ly, TikTok鈥檚 popularity has exploded. ByteDance doesn鈥檛 release figures, but a leaked media kit for potential advertisers in December 2018 showed that the average user opened the app 121 times a week, and spent nearly 27 minutes a day in it. TikTok鈥檚 meteoric rise shows few signs of slowing.
