The ever-so-sweet dose of social media- one can just never get enough of it!! From sharing special moments via photographs (Given that those tons of filters are great motivator too!) to weaving thoughts and posting them on your stories/posts to hogging major limelight by sharing quick updates, social media platforms cater to varied audiences. And just when it gets too “pedestrian” and “run-of-a-mill” for one’s taste, there is always something unique lurking around the bent to change the very paradigm associated with the social media sphere. 

Talking about springing up a new surprise, nothing made inroads in social media game more steadfastly than TikTok. Based on “quick munch-able” bites of videos, TikTok began, as Musical.ly, which was geared towards letting social media users from around the globe, be playful with videos and lip-sync to them. What started as a relatively silent spark turned into a big bang after the platform was renamed as TikTok and its subsequent acquisition by Beijing-based ByteDance. The rest was pretty much history. Venerated as one of the most popular apps of 2018, TikTok surpassed 1 billion downloads around the globe with more than 500 million users in 150+ countries making some serious waves in a ridiculously impressive short span.

With such astonishing accomplishment in a narrow time frame, it surely begs the questions…

 Is TikTok the Next Big Thing in Influencer Marketing? 

Will this platform overtake its pears in terms of not just swath of user base but also by wielding power to mold how companies pitch their products to users in the social media sphere? 

Will it push the traditional marketing approach to bleachers by introducing new offerings of a brand in a cost-effective way?

Well, to understand why TikTok has an edge over its peers, we need to acknowledge the fact that a brand needs the customer to capture the market and without leaving breadcrumbs behind, a customer might get lost in the endless layers of the thing we call ‘the internet’. Hence social media influencing! So does TikTok fit the definition of an effective social media-influencing platform? How effective is TikTok to garner an audience and is it “the” tool for brands to reach out the potential customers? Well, here is a quick look at why Tiktok might whizz past its pears in coming years by establishing itself as a formidable marketing tool-

1. Focused– Unlike other social media platforms which are catering to scores of people across various age brackets, TikTok is more focused, (around 45% of the users to be precise) on people between the age group of 16-24 years. What this does for a brand is to cater to a particular group with its products/services by curating content focused on their predilections and likability. This “always online” generation Z is the greatest asset a brand can utilize for converting social media publicity for real-world sales and TikTok gives a brand the right direction in this sense.
2. Unorthodox– TikTok is a more out-of-the-box approach of making creative videos that are geared towards the organic approach of expressions and inventiveness. It grants a brand a whole new arena to experiment with. With everyone being a creator/influencer, companies can cherry-pick the ones which suit their needs by inputting in radically less effort at the drawing board making it a great market influencing tool.
3. Quick turn-around- With bite-size content that can suit the ephemeral pop culture of the 21st century, TikTok can quickly reach out to the intended audiences and spread the word about the brand like a forest fire. It is fast, really fast, making it ‘bang for bucks’ while letting brands be thrifty with time while working a campaign around it.

Prominent examples!

Chipotle– Always known for being playful on social media platforms, chipotle made TikTok a marketing key point while promoting the annual “Boorito” offer for Halloween. The campaign garnered a staggering 3.6 billion views for #Boorito tag all thanks to some of the most famous influencers jumping on board to post short videos of their Halloween transformation.

Beauty brand ‘TooFaced’- Cosmetic brands have quite a foothold in the social media arena and TikTok being a hot marketing commodity this year, TooFaced ensured to get their name out to wider audiences by teaming up with TikTok influencer Kristen Hancher for campaigning. The results were quite promising in terms of traction the hashtag #toofacedpartner got! The campaign has reached 9.4 million views and is a long-term project, TooFaced has probably placed a safe bet for reaping benefits in the coming month.

Gymshark– Fitness is another vertical with resonates well with Generation Z and Gymshark capitalized on it to the fullest. Gymshark threw open its 66 Days: Change Your Life challenge. TikTok users were encouraged to pick a personal goal which they would work towards and try to achieve it in 66 days. Reward? A year’s supply of Gymshark goodies. In terms of catching eyeballs, it surely was a hit! With more than 2 million likes and an engagement rate of 11.1%, the campaign #gymshark66 has 45.5 million views.

Still in fledging stage, but TikTok surely knows how to host content which is universal in nature as well as radically appealing in very first glace. The platform provides users with the opportunity to unleash creativity while opening doors for the brands to tie-up with rising stars and impact the consumer markets. It will be interesting to see the opportunities the aggressive growth phase of this platform provides to the users as well as to the companies will still be able to maintain ‘high reward, low risk’ narrative as we move forward. But one this is for certain; it won’t be fizzing out anytime soon!