It's 2020: understand TikTok

An insider’s perspective

By Mallaury Boudier

I did it. A few months ago, I created a TikTok account - and so should you if your field of expertise has anything to do with digital content, influencer marketing or social media. Because TikTok/Douyin is here to stay and despising a trend you just don’t want to understand won’t make it less relevant. However don’t follow me, my attempt at posting on it is as embarrassing as your dad’s first Facebook statuses.

After hours of relentless scrolling, I got to understand what makes TikTok so successful, the outstanding stickiness and engagement rate of the app (before you know it’s been an hour you’re there) and the unwritten rules of its creators. 

What is the hype about? Should you consider working with creators on the platform for your brand? What’s next? 

TikTok is getting huge, and will not stop its growth now. 

As we are making our first steps into 2020, it became unnecessary to remind you that TikTok is the fastest growing social media app worldwide. It was the most downloaded app in Q1 2019, with 33 million downloads (Sensor Tower, 2019). Not to mention this success was mostly led by Gen Zers (41% of its users were 16-24 in 2019, Globalwebindex) and by Asia (about one quarter of downloads were coming from India HBR 2019) - a.k.a the most courted target audiences by marketers today.

Actually, I would be wrong defining TikTok as a social media network. It is a social entertainment app. Comparing it to Instagram Stories (as Mark Zuckerberg did; “I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app”) would be an incorrect shortcut only based on the fact the publications share the same full-screen, vertical specs. The nature of the content vastly differs between the two platforms. If we had to refer to another app to make newbies understand TikTok’s storytelling, it could be the dearly missed Vine.

Why?

Understanding the real consumer value of TikTok

Forget everything you know about the typical influencer content that made the success of Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat. Your opinion is not what makes you an opinion leader. Your lifestyle is not what inspires your audience. Your entertainment potential is.

TikTok is not where you follow your social circle, “add your friends”, and keep yourself posted about what they are up to, how is their dog and where they went on their last holiday. You are here to have a good time. 

“TikTokers” who gain popularity are the ones who successfully understood that and know how to put on a show, act different characters and have polished the art of storytelling structure in a premeditated 15 seconds video.

TikTok’s success is the child of the same newsjacking, remixing and meme culture that invaded your regular social media platforms - Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I like to say that Millennials were over-sharers and Gen Zers are over-creators. The way they present themselves to the world is by creating their own content to express how they feel about what’s happening. Not just share, repost or retweet the news with a short comment on it. And they would rather laugh about it and make it a meme. 

Plagiarism is not a concept anymore - content is layered, remixed, reimagined by their own voice. And TikTok’s user experience has been imagined to hand to its users all the tools they need to do so on a silver platter.

Take a few of its main features: the ease to make a duet to react to another user’s video. Another tap away, you can re-use someone else’s video soundtrack/voiceover to make it the pillar of a viral challenge.

Is it for your brand?

You have to ask yourself two key questions.

As said above, TikTok in 2019 and probably in the first half of 2020 will target mainly a very young audience. Are they the consumers you want to engage with your brand? If they are not, it is probably not the platform for you now, so don’t jump on the trend just to be “in”.

If you nodded your head yes to the previous question, you have to consider if your brand image and tone of voice match TikTok. Putting your brand out there requires a deep understanding of how the platform works and what leads content consumption.

The leading creators are digital natives with no consideration for political correctness. TikTok is a buzz-led platform. It means its successful users navigate with talent and creative freedom the boundaries of entertainment, humor and often self-depreciation. 

The most viral posts are often not the most high quality, polished or edited pieces.

If you want to make sure that your brand is seamlessly part of the conversation, you need to think of your brand’s ethos more than of your product’s USPs. Users are not on the hunt for facts and features about products, they want to see your brand interact with their world in a valuable way. Valuable here means: people can engage with it and entertain their peers. 

An amazing best case is the make-up brand e.l.f. campaign. E.l.f. is a budget-friendly cosmetic brand, essentially targeting teens and young adults. The soundtrack “eyes.lips.face” generated more than 1.6 million user-generated videos and +3 billion views, doing their “thing with their eyes”, letting us “see them lips”. This catchy song produced by iLL Wayno and performed by Holla FyeSixWun was actually commissioned by the brand itself for a challenge to win $250 on TikTok. The challenge went so viral than e.l.f. released a music video, which has only amplified the hype even more.

What does this teach us? E.l.f. embraced the codes of TikTok and seeded the tools for users to unleash their creativity, which is what the app is made for. They didn’t push makeup tutorials, product-focused reviews on the platform. The makeup brand ensured the tools they created (here, the soundtrack) were communicating the brand’s values and cheeky tone of voice - “the brand’s innate renegade spirit” in its CMO words. 

And the kids took it over with enthusiasm. Here is the trick, your brand has to accept this trade-off: TikTok users will own your brand’s message, and do what they feel is worthy of buzz with it. Even more than any other influencer marketing incentive, brands need to let go of editorial control. They will make jokes, memes and so on. And it’s ok: as told by Blake Chandlee, VP of TikTok's Global Business Solutions, “On TikTok, what you’ll be rewarded for is taking risks...and being a little bit quirky and delightful”.

Taking e.l.f. campaign as an illustration, the multi-million-followers beauty guru James Charles jumped on the song challenge as well, without using the brand’s products. Same for Jessica Alba, who hijacked the challenge to promote her own beauty brand Honest. The track also generated humoristic TikTok videos like star makeup artist Patrick Starrr’s Halloween interpretation. Taking a step back, consider the earned media value of these three celebrities and other TikTokers’ UGC for e.l.f. : priceless. 

What’s next?

I underlined above the viral awareness potential for brands on TikTok. What about sales? 

As its user growth will inevitably stabilize, TikTok’s upcoming challenge is the monetization of its user database. It is easy to see ByteDance’s efforts, TikTok & Douyin’s (the Chinese local app version) parent company, to grow the company’s advertising offering to brands.

First of all, Bytedance is hiring massively across the globe, showing the global ambition of the Chinese app. Acquiring Musical.ly was the first step. The Chinese tech giant is on the hunt for any source of information to conquer the Western media landscape, continuously acquiring stakes in its key players. The company is looking for local media expertise - with its eyes on the US market as they took over the former Mountain View Whatsapp’s office and hired former Facebook Senior Executive for its American growth. 

Second, TikTok’s incredible popularity among teenagers is a blessing and a curse for its revenue stream. TikTok grew to a monthly billion user base but most of them are not in the age to make their consumption choices independently from their parents.

Conquering older demographics with direct purchase power is already on TikTok’s agenda - deploying advertising campaigns targeting 20-something to convince them the fun is not only for kids.

Last but not least, converting the platform outstanding engagement into actual purchase calls for CTA features. As I write this article, TikTok’s current portfolio of brand solutions includes pushing a brand challenge or a banner on its discover page, custom branded filters and in-feed ads. TikTok ads offering and possible promotion objectives (app install, traffic, and conversion) vary across countries and their availabilities are still limited to few territories. But this will change in a matter of months, as TikTok is already pitching the biggest brands of the world. A reverse-image search tool is rumored to be released after a limited test in China, enabling users to identify in-video products and in-app purchases - taking the Instagram shopping feature to the next level.

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All in all, if you are not convinced to explore TikTok yet, make it a 2020 resolution. Remember the time when you thought Instagram was just an app to put a random vintage filter on your cappuccino - and today, the platform’s move to shopping is estimated to generate $10 billion in revenue by 2021.