3 reasons why TikTok is here to stay and why it is becoming increasingly popular

Whether you are an avid content creator, an entrepreneur with a marketing vocation, or simply desperately dream that your children stop doing stupid dances that were found on TikTok, I have news for you: TikTok is not going to disappear any time soon.

Social media apps come and go, but the consumption of video content continues to grow. The hours spent on content consumption on a smartphone are on track to eventually exceed the hours spent watching television, and the current quarantine is likely to accelerate these consumption trends.

Consider TikTok’s impressive growth statistics :

• As of this writing, TikTok is the most downloaded free social media app, and the second of all app downloads only after Zoom.
• US users account for 20 percent of all TikTok revenue
• According to an online research project from the Influencer Marketing Hub, the engagement rate is higher on TikTok than on other social media platforms (higher than Instagram and five to 10 times higher than Twitter, depending on account size. ).
• TikTok is a triple threat because it combines seamless video creation, an entertainment-based social network, and one-touch syndication options.

Why TikTok is the new Instagram

Instagram’s secret sauce at the time of its 2010 debut was that it allowed users with no prior photography experience to instantly create nice images and share them on a social network. Consumers can apply filters and express their lives visually from the palm of their hand.

Just 18 months after launch, Facebook acquired Instagram, which had zero dollars in revenue at the time, for $ 1 billion, a risky gamble that many analysts now see as the purchase of the decade. The time spent by Instagram users on the platform continued to increase in subsequent years and has only recently stabilized.

TikTok offers a similar “skills acquisition” experience, except this time its users can become expert cameramen. Everything you need to create a multimedia experience, from trimming clips to adding soundtracks and filters, can be done entirely within the app and easily shared with friends, which is key to increasing the time spent on the platform (and potential advertising revenue for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance ).

Here are three key components of the TikTok interface that will ensure its popularity for the coming months and years.

1. The TikTok content editor is native

The app’s features to record images, quickly trim and merge clips, and incorporate music and voice effects at the touch of a button make it a hobbyist’s dream. In case you are new to TikTok:

• Videos are 15 seconds long, but users can create a chain of up to four 15-second segments at a time
• Videos can be shared publicly, sent to selected accounts or can remain completely private
• Tagging other accounts, hashtags, and saving videos to your own albums are part of the ecosystem

The trim feature is particularly attractive because it allows creators to create a storyboard from a video, and then quickly produce and publish a finished product.

2. The TikTok feed is designed to make viral videos

The TikTok home page is much more like Twitter than Facebook or Instagram; Viral videos with a large share move to the front of the line and comprise the feed, and are shown one video at a time (although a “Discover” tab allows you to browse specific topics or hashtags).

This is part of TikTok’s competitive advantage: endless prompts make participation easy because you don’t need to have anything interesting to talk about to get started. Performance-oriented videos are embedded in TikTok’s DNA, especially after ByteDance acquired the lip-sync app Musical.ly in November 2017 and absorbed its features into the TikTok experience.

• To know more: Ultra-basic guide to use TikTok in your brand

Fun dances and hashtag-powered challenges spread at breakneck speed, and at TikTok, the value of entertainment is paramount. The result is that burrow users enjoy going down, and that’s good news for potential ad revenue.

3. TikTok assets are easy to publish

Everett Rogers, professor of communications and author of the popular 1962 book Diffusion Of Innovations, divided adopters of new ideas and technology into five categories: innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and laggards.

Rogers’ research cites both effective communication channels and a social network as factors in the proliferation of ideas, and TikTok does it at full speed. Although innovators and early adopters together account for only 16 percent of the population, the app’s options for syndicating both the videos a person creates and the videos they discover (such as the Instagram story feed), means that the app content is exposed to others, large audiences TikTok content is already created as vertical video, so one-touch syndication to Instagram Stories is very easy and will probably contribute substantially to the organic growth of platform users.

Whether you’re a content creator or more of a social media prowler, you’re likely to hear about TikTok in the coming months and years. Consider getting into fashion, even if it’s just for inspiration and watching the latest 15-second videos that expert users around the world are creating now.