By Brandon Heard and Catherine Dailey
People across the globe are up against the battle against boredom amid COVID-19 lockdowns, finding new ways to stay connected and entertained while safely sheltering within the confines of their home. Streaming services and video conferencing brands have taken center stage, but there is another platform people are turning to for a much-needed escape: TikTok.
The video-sharing app is seeing explosive growth. During the week of March 16th, TikTok saw an 18% increase in downloads in the U.S. That translates to 2 million downloads, compared to 1.7 million the week prior [ Souce: MBW].
It’s now imperative that brands establish a presence to capitalize on this rapidly expanding user base. However, the only thing faster than TikTok’s impressive growth rate is the rate at which trends accelerate before entirely fizzling out.
To match the pace of the platform, brands need to adopt a model that enables them to keep up with the short life cycle of trends on the app. Traditional content calendars, rounds of creative reviews, and repurposing content from other channels will create critical barriers to being relevant and authentic to platform behaviors.
Here’s what you need to know:
TikTokers aren’t documenting their day to day life as they do on Instagram or Snapchat, but instead, seek to create entertaining content that tells a story. It’s performative, unfiltered, and irreverent. Content on the platform isn’t perfect — imperfection is what makes it so endearing.
Contrary to western design practices, TikTok’s product design and AI prioritizes discovery by actively serving the right content to the exact right user on the curated “For You” page, making searching for content a secondary behavior. The content you are most likely to love finds you as opposed to proactively having to seek out your interests. The better your brand’s content, the more likely it is to reach people beyond your active followers. In other words, the cream rises to the top.
Like any strong content strategy, defining your TikTok audience is mission-critical. Broad content categories like food, fashion, comedy, and travel are well represented, but even more fascinating are the sub-communities like Dubsmashers, VSCO girls, or cosplayers that are the driving force behind some of the platform’s most popular trends. TikTok’s algorithm surfaces niche humor to the mainstream. For brands, understanding the nuanced perspectives, jokes, and insights your audience appreciates is essential to creating winning content on the platform. When content is shot, edited, and developed natively within the app, it inherently enables other communities and casual users to participate by recreating the content and making it their own. Uploading overly produced and edited content from outside the app minimizes the ability for user participation, a key driver of platform behavior.
Recently, we’ve seen the acceleration of trends and motivation to participate reach mainstream some of which include:
The #FliptheSwitch challenge features people flipping their lights to Drake’s 2018 single, “Nonstop” cutting to the parties in swapped clothes when the lights cut back on. The challenge expanded to celebrities, including Jlo & Arod
Additionally, brands are finding their footing in paid and organic approaches in an effort to both participate in these trends as well as catalyze them.
Proctor and Gamble teamed up with Charli D’Amelio, the most followed TikTok influencer at 44.3 million followers, to raise awareness around COVID-19. She created a 15-second dance challenge, her specialty, called the “Distance Dance.” Not only did this reach teenagers who make up a large portion of D’Amelio’s following, but for the first 3 million videos created a donation to Feeding America and Matthew 25 were made on behalf of Proctor and Gamble.
Charli D’Amelio — Distance Dance Challenge
With baseball season postponed in light of COVID-19, MLB tapped into the latest TikTok trend of multi-user content with the #WaveChallenge. The organic challenge garnered 96.4M views in the first 5 days driven as a way of celebrating baseball while social distancing.
For long-term success, organic content needs to extend beyond challenges. The Washington Post has strategically shifted its tone and guidelines and leveraged the platform to be an entertaining reflection of cultural happenings and the news of the day. The face of their account is a resident TikTok expert, creating timely content that ladders back to the brand. By offering platform-specific subscription deals, they’ve created an organic approach to driving sales.
There is no one right way to embrace TikTok as part of your brand’s strategy. However, the nature of the platform is such that these trends emerge, evolve, and burn out faster than any other platform. Because of this, the window of opportunity to participate in a relevant way is small and needs to be acted upon quickly, requiring a tight POV and a swift creative process.
Here’s a model that can help:
What you put into your content should always be informed by your brand values and reflect the rapidly evolving culture.
BRAND-DRIVEN: Evergreen elements that are developed internally
1 / Brand Voice
Redefine the guidelines around how your brand presents itself on other platforms, those rules will take a different form here, experimentation is key. If your brand is premium, what does premium mean on TikTok if the platform is about imperfection?
2 / Defined Community
Clearly define the community you want to reach and shamelessly create content for them or with them; nuance wins hearts and earns views, broad stroke humor, and POVs will fall painfully flat. Your community is more than a demographic, listen to what conversations they’re *actually* having.
CULTURALLY DRIVEN: Rapidly evolving elements that require flexible application
3 / Native Behaviors
To navigate the changing landscape of the platform, brand teams must be familiar with how users naturally behave on the platform. Discovering content, creating content, and deriving value from the app should be thoroughly understood.
4 / Emerging Trends
Be acquainted with trends that transcend beyond mainstream culture, but also emerging TikTok sounds, story formats, effects and filters. Weekly trend reporting and becoming active users will drive deeper insights and understanding of the platform and its users.
As TikTok continues to grow its diverse user base, the potential for what brands can do is still being explored and best practices have yet to be established. Brands willing to meet the pace of change will have the ability to write them.
