It’s High Time for TikTok!

TikTok is a social media that enables users to film short musical videos, live streaming, and sending messages.

The app appeared in 2016 in China known as Douyin. Its creator is the IT company ByteDance. In November 2017, ByteDance bought the Musical.ly video service for 1 billion dollars and consolidated 100 million users from Europe and United States and 500 million users from Asia.

In 2020, TikTok became the leader on App Store for iPhones and on Google Play in Russia, according to AppFollow. It conducted the research of top charts of apps. TikTok was the highest-ranking app of the year and led the chart for a long period.

At the end of 2020, App Annie analytical company said that TikTok was the leader by the number of downloads both in Russia and in the world. In 2021, the number of active users is expected to reach 1.2 billion, which is three times more than in 2018.

When TikTok appeared, it was so. It was tested by young audience who try all new things. In 2019, almost 70 per cent of users were people at the age of 16-24.

According to experts, the number of adult users has increased in time. Today, 60 per cent of TikTok audience is people at the age of 18-35. Most of TikTok bloggers are rather young people, but content creators have grown for the last year.

• Perspective of free organic development;
• The app chooses the audience for content;
• Low requirement for its use – to start making videos for TikTok, it is enough to have a mobile phone, you don’t need a tripod or a light source, but the window.

The required format is short vertical videos (not more than one minute long).

The app provides wide opportunities for creativity. Users can use numerous filters, animation, masks and other special effects. One of the most favourite entertainments is the creation of musical videos using lip syncing. To make the one, you need to select a fragment of the song from the database for its further integration into your video.

TikTok content is very diverse. Users dance, go in for sport, make fun, eat, do make-up, share life hacks and cooking tips, share lives of themselves or their pets, make staged videos, make live streamings, teach and share their expert opinions.

Content requirements are standard:

• To publish loyal content;
• To not share things that are intended for 18+;
• To be polite and tolerant;
• To avoid plagiarism;
• To not create fake accounts.

A For You feed on TikTok is the category that contains the most popular videos on the platform. This is the content that the app will recommend its users to watch first.

After video sharing, it will not be watched immediately – you have to wait for 20-30 minutes. This is the time when TikTok analyses the video by hashtags, music and actions shown (yes, this is what the artificial intelligence can do) to show it to the most interested audience.

After that, the app publishes the video for a hundred of users. This is a critical moment because if first users do not like it or swipe through it to the next video, the social media won’t show the video to new users. If the algorithm decides that the content is not interesting to the audience, it won’t promote it.

If the users like the video, it will be recommended to new users. The algorithm does not stop working here, but analyses the behaviour of the audience to show the video to those who will like it the most.

There is no time limit for being in the For You feed – the video may be available until the algorithm decides that the target audience of the video has watched it.

To do that, tap the “+” button on the bottom of the screen, then the icon in the right corner to download the video from the gallery. At this point, you can cut the soundtrack, adjust the volume, choose another sound or change the filter.

To film the video, tap the red button. You can divide the video into some shorter videos. One video must be 15-60 seconds long. There is a 3s and 10s countdown timer on the right part of the screen. In the app, you can adjust the speed of the video, use filters, stickers, special effects, and music, of course.

Angelina Lomakina, the TikTok editor of the Ukrainian media education portal ‘Detector media”, said that the media promotion on TikTok can improve the strength of the organisation, create the image of a modern and youth organisation, and to attract the audience to other social networks of the organisation.

You should experiment to determine the best time for your target audience. TikTok is a social media where users pass the time. In other words, the audience is more active after study/school and at weekends.

You also should keep in mind that generally TikTok users scroll through their feeds and rarely watch their subscriptions. So, it is more important to get into the For You feed, and not just post your video. The coverage depends on the video, so you should study the content overall to understand what influenced the coverage – time or content, or both.

Yes, they do. Not all media have accounts on TikTok, but those who already have are BBС (with a bit more than 600 thousand followers), The Washington Post (939 thousand followers),  USA Today (927 thousand followers). The Russian Novaya Gazeta (29 thousand followers) is also available on TikTok.

By the way, it turns out that the media are not very popular. If a few hundred thousand followers is a success for an account on Instagram and the chance to monetise your account, for TikTok is just the beginning.

Media accounts lack followers because less than a million followers is not much for TikTok.

There is no single strategy of running an account for the media. The Washington Post, for example, creates serious content on their account mixing it with funny posts.

Today, TikTok is requesting serious, expert content as more adults became the audience of the app. However, to make such videos recommended in the For You feed, you need to create quality videos using the trends of the app.