Proponents of the alien invasion theory were wrong – the world was captured not by aliens but by TikTok. The platform for creating and sharing short videos didn’t just shoot but blew up familiar social media templates. Donald Trump has tried to ban it in the US, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent run shows there, and museums popularize science through short videos. Is this a new trend or a whole era? Let’s look at it below.
How TikTok appeared
The company’s founder is Zhang Yiming, a 36-year-old entrepreneur from China who is reasonably compared to Mark Zuckerberg. In 2012, he formed the technology company ByteDance, the parent company for many technology projects, including TikTok.
Douyin, a local app owned by ByteDance, was launched in 2016 and immediately captured the hearts of over 100 million Chinese users. But the owners did not want to be limited to one country and were aimed at international markets.
So a year later, ByteDance launched a copy of the Douyin app in Indonesia and called it TikTok. Then there was a merger with the Musical.ly platform, and the Chinese video service gained worldwide popularity.
With over 104 million downloads in 2018, TikTok has become the world’s most popular app, overtaking YouTube, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
The number of users of the video platform is 689 million people, and in India, the monthly audience has reached more than 20 million users.
What is TikTok
TikTok is a short video-sharing app. They last no more than 15 seconds, the feed is endless, you do not need to concentrate and read the signatures. Yes, this is not the most intellectual pastime, and you can get stuck for the whole evening, but the platform’s success is not in stupid videos but in the same way the content is presented.
The main audience is Gen Z. Almost 70% of users are between 16 and 24 years old, making TikTok’s youngest audience. Remember – Facebook and Instagram were social networks for students and young people that their parents did not use. The growth of these sites and the increase in the average age of users indicate that the development path of TikTok may be the same.
How TikTok works
Many creators of content applications have long realized that users sometimes do not know what they want to listen to, see or read. Zhang Iming is one of them. He implemented the idea of a “smart tape” in one of his first projects and has constantly been developing it since then, simplifying people’s lives with the help of artificial intelligence.
The company does not disclose the algorithms for the application, but some of them can be understood by using the service for some time and having an idea of the work of Facebook and Instagram.
To display content, the platform uses artificial intelligence, which considers the location and interests of the user. The application analyzes the content and compiles a personalized feed with a relevant and interesting selection. It considers how many times the video was watched, how long it was viewed, how many people left comments, liked, shared, or saved to favorites.
Over time, TikTok begins to understand user preferences better and offers content similar to the one they liked.
Video moderation also occurs – first, videos check neural networks recognize certain algorithms or behavior patterns to detect potentially malicious and dangerous content. Then real people are involved in the verification – in each country. Its team does it. Videos are removed for violating community guidelines. When the video has passed all the stages, it is passed to the recommendation feed, gaining views.
An additional type of content moderation is complaints that users leave. Along with the provisions common to all social networks prohibiting incitement to hatred, bullying, and propaganda of terrorism, TikTok does not include overly explicit videos, nude bodies, and even the spoken or the written word “sex.”
Why is TikTok so popular?
Content creators are attracted by the unique format, simple video filming and editing, and the speed of content distribution. Videos quickly go viral, gain millions of organic views, and TikTokers turn out to star in a week without a major production investment.
The creation of videos does not take much time and effort, which allows you to produce a lot of content and gain momentum in popularity. YouTube, which until recently was the main supplier of new celebrities, does not have such functionality, so users leave for TikTok.
TikTok in India
The application came to us, and the whole world was greeted warmly by the target audience and a little frivolously by brands and companies. It should be noted that soon the attitude of business towards it changed, and it became a powerful platform for advertising and promotion.
In February 2019, TikTok was in fourth place in terms of usage time – the average user spent 13 minutes a day there.
At the same time, the average age of the Indian-speaking audience of the service is older than the world – 45% of users are people between the ages of 25 and 44. More than 30% of people under 21 consider TikTok their main social network.
The monthly number of active users of the TikTok short video service in India has reached 20.2 million.
TikTok has developed several media formats successfully used by large Indian companies. After a third of the publications were published, users recognized the product in the comments, and the number of views exceeded 5 million.
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