The Business Clock of TikTok

The Business Clock of TikTok

A New Face, and it Sings

No one thing comes into mind when describing the year (2020) that just concluded, as it has certainly left it’s mark in history for many different reasons. Opportunity might not come into a lot of minds when describing a year with high tensions and an infectious disease that kept most inside for months. Assisted with this change in society and the way people simply live, you could say that one app became a refreshing new face in an untapped part of the social media universe.

The last time such a place was tapped, we were given Snapchat, an industry changer that surpasses Twitter in daily users. Right off the bat, part of you wants to say that is is the same thing and that who really cares about yet another way for the youth to send videos back and forth to one another? In some ways, that is true, but just behind the curtain, we could see it is very complex in the way that it differs from say Snapchat or Instagram. Rather, it breaks free from a traditional social profile structure as the app is based more on newer, forever adapting trends that keep this society alive.

Rapid Video Creation

Before really looking into how this Tok Tiks, it’s important to understand that it has taken such a fast road to the top because it’s predecessors like Snap, Instagram, Vine, or Twitter have taken precious time paving that road. Part of what makes that good for Tiktok is that it’s basic and settle similarities is something that everyone is familiar with and could understand quite easily. These similarities make the user comfortable in sensing that they aren’t using anything too bizarre or hard to understand, but they are constantly reminded that this is a smart new culmination of all the things that made the other apps great, and then some.

For examples of this culmination, we look at TikTok’s parents so to speak to get an idea such as Snapchat or even Vine. A valid part of Snapchat’s success in recent years have been it’s filters that are known to become trendy and spark interest for people to use them once they are seen. Since Tiktok’s theme is clearly based around music, their innovative new way of trending filters is through the sound behind the video or voice effects that one could add to make their video more lively. These snippets of sound could be from other viral videos of the past, or from movie or even excerpts of songs. This type of video making could have the power to start a entirely new viral trend if they catch enough following. Once that happens, that specific way of making a video could turn into a challenge, where people encourage each other to doing it as it quickly turns into a hot trend on the app. We saw something very similar in this when Vine was taking the world by storm, as well as the short video length that made Vine fun and spontaneous.

Another example of culmination from features of it’s predecessors, is Tiktok’s way of turning the hashtag into something that Twitter had only hoped to do. The hashtag plays the much needed role of providing the inner platform for whatever trend or repeating format is going viral at the time. This makes the challenges stated before, much easier to culminate as the hashtag could be used to see all the other videos pertaining to that specific challenge. This gives more reason and purpose for the hashtag rather than it being used as a mediocre way of getting exposure through spamming them like in Instagram or Twitter.

New-Age Karaoke

The original parent company Musical.ly, was initially going for an educational app, which is something that soon proved to be unprofitable. The creators Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang had quickly changed course to a less serious and more vibrant app that allowed short lip syncing videos to be the main source of it’s platforms content. This method made much more efficient to get the venture that exposure and momentum that it needed, propelling it to 70 million downloads by 2016. At this point, Douyin was a similar app in China from parent company Byte Dance that thrived from short video content.

It’s merge with Musical.ly 2017 rebranded it as TikTok which is what propelled it even further to being a go-to social platform for all countries alike, establishing more presence in the United States than ever before. Since that time, the app has been downloaded over 2 billion times and has brought so much to the table in the meantime. The key of Tiktok is that it offers a more abundant array of creating content than any other platform to date. Whether it be a new song, or a viral video to take a snippet from, Tiktok is forever adapting to the trends around it and strategically using that to give it’s audience something new to try.