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Why Tiktok ?

“Imagine a version of Facebook that was able to fill your feed before you’d friended a single person. That’s TikTok.”
— John Herrman, New York Times Columnist

The target audience of digital media and broadcasting company Vice is those aged 18 to 35 and according to Vice, their readers love discovering “what’s new,”- the latest trends in Art, Music and Design, as well as in Technology.

My group began brainstorming, what’s something this age group would like to know more about? We realised that although 18 to 35-year-olds are ‘digital natives,’ a form of popular technology we lacked any knowledge of was the social media and video app ‘Tiktok.’ My group members had mostly heard of Tiktok through advertising and conversations with those around the ages of 10 to 14 who seemed too heavily frequent the app. If it had such a big user-base of adolescents, why were we not using it and what are the dangers associated with it?

Fun Stuff We’re Including

My group spent yesterday afternoon discussing ways we could better engage our audience.

There are various tactics we can employ to ensure that Millennials are contributing too, or commenting on the content we produce. One would be to use ‘clickbait,’ which encourages users to tag their friends in the comments. We will also be strategic in our captions, for example using, “Tag a friend who secretly uses TikTok.”

Another way to engage with Millennials could be to run a competition. This competition could encourage competitors to create their own TikToks. We may also try to establish our own TikTok trends/hashtags that users can contribute to. Creating engaging content with a clear strategy is the first step to user engagement, if we successfully do this, users will contribute and comment on our posts

Other engagement tactics include:

Finding the, ‘Best Tiktok of the Week’ Videos.

Creating ‘Know Your Meme Quiz.’

What We’ll Do Differently

Due to Tiktok’s rapid growth in popularity and its’ select millennial audience, numerous feature articles have been published about it. A couple examples include:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/tiktok-video-app-growth-867587/

‘If You Can Get Famous Easily, You’re Gonna Do It’: How TikTok Took Over Music

As a group we discussed how to differentiate ourselves. We decided to get an interview with the talent agency Born Bred talent, the first talent agency in Sydney to be dedicated to TikTok influencers. We hope this will provide insight into the success of the application and the new generation of influencers it’s helping to create.

We also plan to further describe the community on the platform? We plan do this through various interviews with TikTokers like my cousin and vox pops.

Unlike other feature articles we plan to use the TikTok platform itself and integrate it into our feature. We could create short videos on Tiktok, detailing how to make Tiktok video. This will help with making our feature more interactive, colourful and relatable to Vice’s target audience.

The creation of the hashtags #FeelingOldYet, #WTFTikTok, and #WYDGenZ will aid in the further share-ability and thus dissemination of the feature article.

Research

In order to better come up with an angle and pitch for our story we had to conduct thorough research into ‘Tiktok.’

We discovered that over 65% of TikTok users are under 30 (Konstruct digital, 2019) and that TikTok has captured the younger demographic by targeting the increase in smartphone use within this age group (the conversation).

However, with the platform’s sudden spike in popularity and with a young and impressionable audience, there is an understandable ‘media panic’ surrounding safety for its’ users.

Some headlines include, “TikTok Has a Predator Problem” and is and “Is TikTok, a Chinese Cambridge Analytica data bomb waiting to explode.”

I think this is leading us in the direction of creating a more holistic portrayal of ‘Tiktok.’ We want to confront negative misconceptions and media panic surrounding the popular platform and give audiences access to the array of TikTok subcultures.