Facebook has sleepless nights over TikTok

It is often said nothing lasts forever and indeed life seems to prove that. Before there was Facebook, today's social media juggernaut which has revolutionized how we communicate - and altered the face of media - there was MySpace. MySpace was targeted at an identical audience as Facebook was in its infancy years, had robust capabilities, and was within the market long before Facebook. It generated enormous interest, gained plenty of early press, acquired huge valuation when investors jumped in, and was in many ways undoubtedly not only an early internet success - but a seminal information processing system for the movement we've now come to call social media. On top of that, MySpace was purchased by News Corporation, a powerhouse media entity, and was given professional managers to assist it to navigate its future and appropriated with all the resources it ever wanted to support its growth. By the majority ways we glance at modern start-ups, MySpace was the first winner and will have gone on to great glory. But things didn't prove that way, Facebook was hatched by some college undergrads and commenced to grow. Meanwhile, MySpace stagnated as Facebook exploded to 600 million active users. During early 2010, as reported by the Telegraph, MySpace gave up its social media leadership dreams and narrowed its focus to the niche of being a "social entertainment destination”. MySpace was forced to chop costs, peeling off half its staff in just one week.

Fast forward to 2016, TikTok, a video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming was launched. TikTok can be summarized as an App used to create short dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. ByteDance first launched Douyin for the China market in September 2016. Later, TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in markets outside of China. It became available within the USA after merging with Musical.ly on 2 August 2018. In 2019. Since January 2019, TikTok has been installed over 104.7 million times, which is a rise of 46% within the span of a year, making it the foremost downloaded non-gaming app worldwide, in step with Sensor Tower, a mobile app store data analytics firm. TikTok is that the only app that’s not owned by Facebook to grace the highest five downloads within the rankings. So maybe you’ll sit TikTok out. But these things have a way of sneaking up behind you. Maybe you never joined Snapchat — but its rise worried Facebook to the extent that its prettier product, Instagram, was remade in its image, and copied concepts from there. And maybe you skipped Twitter — but it still rewired your entire news diet, and, besides, it’s how a certain President talks to you now. TikTok does away with many of the assumptions other social platforms are built upon, and which they're within the process of discarding anyway. It questions the primacy of individual connections and friend networks. It unapologetically embraces central control instead of pretending it doesn’t have it. TikTok’s real influence going forward could also be that the opposite social media platforms decide that our friends were simply holding us back. Or, at least, it had been holding them back.

Enter the COVID-19 Pandemic, TikTok became the place to vent and daydream how a non-socially distanced world felt like. TikTok has since surpassed 2 billion downloads on mobile devices following a surge in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The video-sharing app already had a red carpet entrance to 2020, attracting 315 million new installs since January, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower. TikTok's 315 million first-quarter downloads dwarf numbers out of other platforms. And is reportedly the most downloads any app has ever received in a single quarter. In November 2018, Facebook released a TikTok competitor named Lasso, but the app has remained muted since its debut. This puzzling development has been thought to be causing the Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg to have ‘a change of heart’ about data privacy. This is rather an odd development given the fracas that followed the 2016 USA presidential election and Facebook's role in how user data was utilized and sold to the highest bidder. The TikTok dilemma for Facebook is further complicated by the fact that a hostile takeover bid has near to zero chance of succeeding given the ownership structure of TikTok. It can be said that Facebook and indeed Mr. Zuckerberg may be having Déjà vu feelings of Myspace and just like the name, maybe, and perhaps just maybe, the clock is going Tick Tock on Facebook.

Authored by:

Vituli Musukuma

Finance & Economic Analyst I Entrepreneur I Business Advisor

About the Author: Vituli is a finance Professional, Entreprenear and Business advisor with 10+ years of experience working for reputable local and international Organizations. Vituli is a senior Finance and Economic analyst at the Institute for Finance and Economics Zambia. He is the founder of Operation Decent Child (ODC), an organization that aims to work with high school and college students in entrepreneurship, mentorship, and career development and the founder of The Graton Academic Achievement Award [ Trust] (GAAA[T]), a project that rewards top performing students in high school and assists vulnerable individuals with educational needs. 

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