Fairly new to the social media stage and with more than 500 million monthly active users, TikTok is a video app that has quickly taken the world by storm. Launched three years ago by the Chinese parent company ByteDance, and originally named Douyin, it had 100 million users in its first year, and 1 billion videos were being watched across the platform every day. About a year after Douyin’s launch, ByteDance purchased the Musical.ly app, and, merged together, TikTok was born in 2018.

Allowing users to upload 15 second music and lip-sync videos and 60 second looping videos (deja-vu for any old Vine users out there…) TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media platforms in the world. In Q1-2019 alone, it ranked as the top most downloaded app in Apple’s iOS App Store, with over 33 million downloads, and and the quarter also saw 188 million new users (a 70% increase from Q1-2018).

How does TikTok Work?

Creators (aka TikTokers) on the platform can create video and slideshow content directly within the app. TikTok’s integration with Apple Music gives Creators the ability to add, remix, and save songs and sounds to their content, and other video editing options allow Creators to apply filters, stickers, GIFs, emojis, and other special effects.

TikTok users can follow Creators and accounts, and have the ability to give hearts (ie: ‘like’), comment on or share videos. They can also make in-app purchases of “coins”, which they can give to Creators they follow.

Scrolling through the platform, you’ll see the video community publishes a variety of posts on a daily basis. Here are a few examples:

• Music Videos: These can be live performances, lip-synching, song covers, etc., but these mini music videos will regularly show up on a user’s feed any given day
• Duets: The Duets feature allows users to ‘reply’ to a musical post by recording their own version to the same music. This response video is then side by side to the original post.
• Challenges: Challenges on TikTok have the ability to go viral really quickly, using hashtags or popular songs to spur responses. Jimmy Fallon launched the #TumbleweedChallenge last year, which resulted in record engagement spikes for the app.

Who uses TikTok?

It’s been reported that 41% of TikTok users are between the ages of 16 and 24, which makes sense given that TikTok’s own target audience is the under 18 group.

TikTok allows users to create and share funny videos while singing, dancing, or lip-syncing to their favorite tunes. It allows the younger crowd to express themselves in a creative way, whether that’s by dancing, singing, or doing some form of comedy. If you think of it this way, it’s no surprise why it has generated so much hype among the teens of the world.

Although these stats show that the majority of the audience on the social media platform are Gen Z, TikTok’s popularity is increasing in older demographics as well.

Marketing on TikTok

Based on the average user age noted above, if your brand’s target demographic is Gen Z and you’re not on TikTok, then you may be missing out on reaching a massive audience. As advertising on the app is fairly new, most brands currently active on it (Nike, Fenty Beauty, Chipotle, Apple Music) are there for brand awareness and engagement purposes only.

In order to be successful on TikTok, brands must get creative to really stand out from the rest of the creative genius flowing through the app. For example, Guess was the first fashion retailer to get active on TikTok late last year, using the #InMyDenim challenge to kick things off. Racking in 38 million views, the hashtag challenge encouraged users to film music videos while wearing items from Guess’ new denim line.

Check out the trending content on the app to understand what users are interested in and what’s going viral. Even if you decide TikTok may not be the best option for your brand at the moment, you can view some of the current content to stimulate ideas for your content for other social platforms, like Instagram or Facebook.

If your target demographic is not yet active on TikTok, they may very well be in the near future, so don’t write it off as a marketing platform just yet. Get familiar with the app by testing the waters a bit: create a content, follow some popular users, post some test content, encourage engagement, and see what works.