TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform of all time. The video-sharing social media app owned by Chinese company ByteDance is available in over 150 countries and is expected to reach 1.8 billion users by the end of 2022. In the U.S. alone it’s been downloaded over 200 million times.
What makes TikTok additionally appealing to brands is its popularity with the coveted youth and young adult markets. It’s reported that 25% of all users are in the 10-19 age range, while a little over 22% are 20-29 years old, meaning a whopping 47.4% of users are under 30. Meanwhile, 52.83% of all creators are young adults between the ages of 18-24.
Big name brands from a range of industries are on the platform, such as fast casual restaurant Chipotle, with 2 million followers and 46 million likes, and fashion heavy-hitter Guess, with 128.7 thousand followers and 829.8 thousand likes. Sports is huge on the platform as well, with the NBA, the NFL, and the NBA raking in over 900 million combined likes. Even media powerhouse The Wall Street Journal recently decided to get on board, joining in early October.
And no surprise, when one considers that “TikTok is on track to make nearly $10 billion in ad revenue, more than double what it generated last year,” reports the New York Times.
Getting in front of the right audiences has never been easier. By joining TikTok Creator Marketplace, brands can collaborate with the perfect content creators based on reach, views, audience location, audience age, topics/interests, and country/region. Best of all, the marketplace is free to use for any TikTok business account.
To win eyeballs on TikTok, Zoetica Media founder Kami Huyse also recommends “understanding that its algorithm skews more toward behavioral factors than demographic ones. In essence, they are trying to create groups of people with similar behaviors. In addition to creating content, brands need to engage with the types of accounts they want to reach to train the algorithm. You can also do a Duet or a Stitch with similar creators to gain traction.”
But before jumping on the TikTok bandwagon, brands should consider two things. One is the platform’s relatively weak content moderation, which has led to widespread multilingual misinformation on topics ranging from politics and health to the war in Ukraine.
The second is the FBI’s increasing concern about TikTok’s threat to American national security interests. FBI Director Christopher Wray recently expressed fears that “China’s government could use the app to control millions of users’ data or software, and its recommendation algorithm — which determines which videos users will see next — ‘could be used for influence operations should they so choose.’”
