I Just Joined TikTok. Here’s What Marketers Should Know.

My biggest fear in life has never been public speaking. It’s never been spiders, nor heights, nor crawl spaces – as terrifying as they are.

Rather, oddly enough, my biggest fear is losing touch with youth. It’s not about getting older, per se. But I’m terrified of becoming the old guy who complains about “kids these days.” I fear a future version of myself on his front porch who says, “I don’t understand the youths and their music. Now, Shawn Mendes and Lil Nas X, that was the real stuff!”

Throughout my 20s, I felt far more youthful. After all, I was one of those millennials that every market researcher wanted to dissect. High school and college were somewhat recent memories. In graduate school, I learned from my undergraduate students about Snapchat stories and words like “lit” and “turnt.”

But I’m 31 now – firmly an adult, and unlike when I was in graduate school, I’m not hanging around younger people as much. Companies are no longer dissecting my every thought like they used to – they’ve instead moved on to Gen Z.

As a marketer, I’ve been reading lots of books and articles on Gen Z, trying to learn as much about them as possible. But to truly stay in touch with the future, I needed to take more drastic measures.

It was time to learn TikTok!

What Is TikTok?

TikTok is the hottest social media platform on the Internet. It’s a video-sharing service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and is best described as roughly a combination of Snapchat and now-defunct Vine.

Users of the platform upload videos – generally around 15 seconds but they can go up to a minute – spiced up with music, dancing, filters, special effects, all that fun stuff. Like other social media platforms, users can like and comment on other posts.

The service uses sophisticated artificial intelligence such as facial recognition to determine which videos to show in your feed. Whatever the secret sauce is, it’s working. In the U.S. alone, research firm eMarketer notes that in 2019, more than 37 million users accessed their TikTok account at least once a month. Meanwhile, I’ve read other statistics indicating the average user spends 45-60 minutes A DAY on the app.

Despite its growing popularity, TikTok is still sorting out its monetization strategy. The company has tried tactics such as hashtags and native video. Yet TikTok doesn’t have the rich user data that, say, Facebook has, making it more difficult for brands to micro-target. Also, I don’t know how much data is given to brands, but the data available for the general public is nowhere near the level given by publicly traded companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Snap.

The app hasn’t been without its controversy. In February 2019, the parent company was hit with a $5.7 million fine by the Federal Trade Commission for illegally collecting data from people under the age of 13. The company has also been accused of censoring pro-Hong Kong content in China and LGBTQ-friendly posts in Turkey. And in late 2019, the U.S. government opened a national security investigation into the firm for allegedly sending data over to Chinese authorities (the company firmly denies this accusation). 

But let’s not dwell on those controversies for now — it’s time to get started on TikTok.

Getting Started on TikTok

When I decided to learn about TikTok, I thought it would be more fun to do it with friends. I reached out to several of them. But only one, my friend David Branch, was interested in TikToking with me.  

We met at a coffee shop on Saturday afternoon and got to work. When I first download the app, I was given a menu of different interests – food, travel, sports, etc. – to select from in order to show me relevant videos. After that, I set up a username and basic profile information and, voila, I was ready to start to start TikToking.

Next, I needed some inspiration. I wanted to see who I personally knew on TikTok. Like other social media platforms, there is a feature that finds my Facebook friends who are on the service. And surely a lot of them are given its popularity, right?

Nope. Turns out, only 15 names came up. Given I have more than 1,300 friends on Facebook, that’s just over 1% of my friends who are on TikTok. Of those 15, the majority haven’t posted anything. That tells me that while TikTok is clearly big with teens, it really hasn’t caught on with a broader segment of the population.

So next, we looked up a list of the most popular TikTokers are to get a sense of what a good video should entail. I expected the top TikTok accounts to be mainstream, A-list celebrities. Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber maybe?

Wrong again! The most followed person on TikTok, with nearly 40 million followers, was a girl named Loren Gray, someone I had never heard of. Although some celebrities and well-known brands have built a following, the list of top accounts primarily consisted of new media, Gen Z stars.

Making the Videos

After checking out some videos, it was time to make some magic happen. David and I were right across the street from a park -- it seemed like a good spot to find some creative inspiration. As we walked around the park, we brainstormed ideas for TikTok videos. We shot a couple, played with some features, but the shots weren’t quite ready for the web.

Soon, we walked up to a pond where geese were hanging out. I took a video one of the geese ever so confidently staring out into the pond. Once I got the video, it was time to add graphics and music. The user interface was super self-explanatory. I added a backward hat to the goose, added a musical soundtrack and bam, my first TikTok went live.

After posting one more sophomoric video parodying of MTV Cribs, we called it a day. I learned TikTok and felt accomplished.

So What Should Marketers Know?

As with all my LinkedIn articles, I’m not here just to tell you interesting stories about my life. Rather, there needs to be lessons learned. Based on my limited use of TikTok, here’s some key points I think marketers should keep in mind:

TikTok probably isn’t a fad…: There have been a lot of social media platforms that have come and gone – MySpace, Vine, Google+ and YikYak are a few that come to mind.

Yet I don’t think TikTok is going to meet the same fate. There’s just too much attention on the site for it to quickly become irrelevant. Plus, unlike Vine and YikYak, TikTok is backed by a Chinese behemoth valued at $75 billion, giving TikTok the funds to compete with the big players looking to grow copycats (Facebook has Lasso, which has been, ummm, less successful). 

…But it’s probably a niche service: The fact that only 15 of my more than 1,300 Facebook friends were on TikTok – the majority of whom were inactive — was quite telling. After all, while the service hasn’t reached maturity, it isn’t totally new to the market either. Plus, consumer awareness is pretty high given TikTok bombarded social media with $1 billion in ads in 2019 encouraging people to join its service.

In fact, eMarketer projects growth to slow considerably. While TikTok’s U.S. user base grew by 97.5% in 2019, that’s expected to drop to 21.9% in 2020, with growth rates projected to decline in subsequent years. Simply put, I just don’t think your Grandma is going to post heavily-filtered karaoke videos anytime soon.

Brands should keep an open mind, but a closed wallet: After spending a couple days on the service, I can see why marketing managers are absolutely salivating over this. The app is super easy to use. I can easily see how ads could be run without major disruption to the user experience. Gen Z, who consumer marketers spend a lot of time courting, spend a ton of time on the app (I can tell you firsthand it is VERY addicting).

And yes, some brands have built a nice following on the service (Chipotle has been my favorite). But before you start making big changes to your marketing budget, keep in mind a few things:

• TikTok is under regulatory scrutiny and we don’t know how that’s going to play out.
• As mentioned before, the service’s microtargeting abilities aren’t as robust as they are on, say, Facebook. Therefore, you may not have a complete picture on who you’re getting in front of. If you really want to go after the TikTok crowd, consider working with the TikTok personalities directly.
• Everyone is talking a big game about Gen Z right now. But is that really who you’re going after currently? Does this platform fit with your brand? Plus, don’t expect widespread adoption anytime soon.

But hey, now I know how to use TikTok, and I feel all caught up with the social media universe and youth culture. Wait, now I need to learn Yolo? Ugh!

What do you think the future of TikTok is? Have any TikTok tips or people/brands I should follow? Feel free to comment below. And don’t forget to check out some of my other articles:

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