With Tik Tok usage continuing to grow, it’s no wonder that many businesses are jumping on board and creating their own presence within the channel, BUT the big question remains: Is it right for me? This article provides some general information about Tik Tok and how it’s used to help you understand whether it’s worth investing resource, and dollars, into.
So what is Tik Tok and how is it different to other social channels?
As described by themselves (tiktok.com), Tik Tok is a short form mobile video destination channel. It is available globally however, is known as Douyin in China. Now owned by the Chinese corporation ByteDance Ltd, Tik Tok initially entered the social scene as Music.Ly in 2014, a Chinese social media site which allowed people to share short lip sync videos.
Now, 8 years on, according to datareportal.com, Tik Tok is ranked 6th on the social media channel usage scales with over 1 billion ACTIVE monthly users. This compares with the other key social channels of Facebook at 2.912 billion, You Tube 2.562; Whatsapp 2+ billion and Instagram 1.452 billion (Source: https://datareportal.com/social-media-users). If you think about the fact that Facebook launched in 2004, there’s a good chance that Tik Tok could at least reach, or potentially even exceed, Facebook’s following in coming years.
According to Digital 2022, Tik Tok was the most downloaded app in Australia in 2021, so it definitely has captured the attention of social media users here as well. These statistics are all fine and well but, is Tik Tok suitable for your business. I’ve done some research and pulled out some key points that might help you learn a bit more about the channel as well as understand whether it’s suitable for you.
Tik Tok users in Australia
There’s a lot of global interest in Tik Tok however, being a locally driven marketer, I thought it important to share some of the Australian insights so that you can get a clearer picture of how it’s being used within our market.
There are multiple sources available to review the various social stats but I’ve opted to share some of the key insights from wearesocial.com’s Australian analysis (Source: https://wearesocial.com/au/blog/2022/02/digital-2022-australia-online-like-never-before/) as well as Tik Tok’s own platform (Source: https://www.tiktok.com/business/en-AU/insights) and Roy Morgan (http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/8538-launch-of-tiktok-in-australia-june-2020-202010120023) to help provide you with a summary of key data so here goes:
- 32% of social media users between 16-64 use Tik Tok
- 61% of Australian Tik Tok users are female
- Over 70% of users are from Generation Alpha (born 2006 – now) and Generation Z (predominantly born 1991 – 2005)
- 9% of Tik Tok users are Millennials; 4% Generation X; <2% Baby boomers or older
- 6% of all social media users rate Tik Tok as their favourite channel (compared to over 26% for Facebook)
- Monthly usage has increased by 40% to 23.4 hours (important note: Facebook declined 3%)
- Tik Tok is the 7th most used social channel (perceived to be climbing) in Australia
- Full channel ranking: #1 Facebook; #2 Facebook Messenger; #3 Instagram; #4 What’s App; #5 iMessage; #6 Snapchat; #7 Tik Tok; #9 Twitter; #10 Pinterest; #11 LinkedIn
Why do they use it?
The concept of social media is exactly that, socialisation! Whether it’s family or friends, it’s opened up an entire new way of keeping your social group up to date with what’s going on in your life and, according to wearesocial.com’s 2022 report, that’s still the case for over 56 % of users. The next most important fact is that 36.8% of users state that they are using it to fill in time. Therefore, why not fill in time with stuff that makes you laugh, cry, or just get lost in. And use it they are, more and more. In Australia, Tik Tok users spent on average 23.4 hours absorbed by content (wearesocial.com). This is the highest of the key 5 channels in Australia ( Facebook, Instagram, What’s App, You Tube and Tik Tok). So, although they don’t have the same volume of users you could hypothesise the Tik Tok’s users are more highly engaged than all others.
Tik Tok really is more about the filling in time and social status: users do use it to build social standing by following (and be followed by) people that they feel fit within their virtual status group. It’s become a real standing on how many people you follow and what level of engagement you get. Influencers have developed entire lifestyles out of this and, some of them have become very popular as a result of simply posting to social sites. Many people aspire to this and so mimic much of their life on what they see influencers do. Tik Tok trends are an actual thing – people do something and then it’s followed by others and they take videos of themselves doing it and so the trend continues. Some have actually resulted in very negative situations, such as death, so we know that social influence can be a major issue in society if it’s not properly legislated and monitored.
In many ways, social channels are both an outlet and a way to build a personal persona. Tik Tok helps people to do this and creating their own content, being shared and followed, is possibly something that helps them to feel comfortable with who they are. I’m certainly not saying that this is the primary reason but it’s definitely an evolving social situation.
Why is its popularity growing?
In marketing, we’ve seen that engagement with video on on-demand content has been growing rapidly. This is driven very much by the consumer wanting to feel inspired and we know that video can help to capture the attention of audiences much faster than a text based message and image. Younger generations love technology and are much more in-tune to it, creating a real need for higher quality content to drive engagement. Gone are the days of waiting via the letterbox for the postman to drop a detailed letter from your best friend who lived 2 suburbs away, spending hours reading and then returning the conversation via paper and pen. The immediate satisfaction of being able to have a face to face conversation via messenger (even messenger kids), FaceTime, zoom or the various different apps there has changed the way that younger generations communicate and social channels are simply keeping up (in some ways setting) the standards to drive these. Video content is much more highly rated than static content now across advertising in social channels therefore forcing marketers to keep up with the demands, and maintain the engagement, for all users.
The other simple reason is that it’s new, fresh and exciting. Many of us in Australia spent at least some (or most) of 2021 at home and needing to be entertained so usage on mobile devices increased as a result of this. People were needing to pass the time doing something with no gyms, pubs, clubs or even some workplaces open, to keep the hours full. Actually, according to the digital ready report, 82.8% of internet users between the ages of 16-64 watched video content via the internet each week. That’s a very big number when you think that there’s 23.6 million internet users (91% of the population) in Australia. Now, not all of these are accessing video content to view their social media accounts, Google is still the #1 ranked website searched so there is a large proportion of people still “looking” for things but 20.3% are live streaming videos and 16.7% of the total are looking at influencer videos and VLOGS so it’s still a meaty number from an audience perspective.
Why advertise in this channel?
As with all social media channels, they have some really great stats to help persuade you to spend your marketing dollars with them above any one else. Let’s look at why Tik Tok feel you should be persuaded (Source: https://www.tiktok.com/business/en-AU/insights):
- 1 in 3 users have purchased a product in the past year after seeing it on Tik Tok
- TikTok users are 79% more likely than other platform users to discuss a product a salesperson once viewing it on Tik Tok
- Users are 1.4 times more likely to find new product or service within Tik Tok
- Users are 1.5 times more likely to immediately purchase a brand or product that they’ve seen in Tik Tok
- 1 in 2 use the platform to learn more about a brand or product
- Tik Tok users are 50% more likely to persuade others to try a brand or product because they saw it on the platform
There’s also some interesting general stats on Tik Tok from wearesocial.com:
- Potential ad reach of 7.38 million
- Can reach up to 37% of the 18+ age population in Australia
- 55.3% female ad reach
The challenge with Tik Tok is that it currently doesn’t drive measurable traffic to outside websites (as compared to existing social channels). In August 2021 Tik Tok did launch in in-app shopping solution, but this isn’t going to solve the problem for a number of organisations as it means integrating another purchase channel in an ever growing / complicated e-commerce driven business society. Many businesses simply can’t support this, for many reasons.
With this being a present limitation, from a marketing perspective, I would recommend that brand be a key focus of any advertising whilst users become more comfortable / familiar with moving to purchase outside of the channel and engage with you directly (or you can justify changing your e-comms strategy to incorporated Tik Tok’s shopping). What this means is, if you want to reach people that are within the key user groups on Tik Tok, your brand would do well having presence that will then provide a stronger positive awareness and affiliation to create purchase intent, not necessarily drive sales directly from the app.
Will this trend continue?
I will be honest, I’m not a user of Tik Tok. Actually the idea of spending my days creating 15 second videos to amuse others, or build an individual profile, is far from appealing. I prefer to pass the time with a good book or movie and am comfortable with the social interactions I get from Facebook and Instagram but, well, I’m definitely not within the demographic of the key user group so you aren’t looking to target me. I feel that the usage of Tik Tok is going to continue to grow as younger tech savvy generations start to jump on and be included in the key statistics (noting that Tik Tok only reports on 18+ users). We’ve seen users migrate their time to Tik Tok which means they feel they’re getting greater value out of that as social fulfilment, over Facebook and Instagram. Being 8th in the social platforms list means that there is definitely still growth available and so I’d be watching this space over the next 1-2 years. We see every year that the number of people using social media increases (+4.6% LY), the time that they are spending within these sites is also increasing (+10.4% LY) and this trend is unlikely to decrease however, the social channel saturation is likely to change. It’s likely that Tik Tok will continue to grow momentum but my thoughts are that there is potential to be more and more social platforms enter the market as technology continues to grow and evolve. As consumers, the more we get, the more we want, and social satisfaction is a key driver of this. As we get bored there’s always something in the background to take it’s place. Tik Tok is only in it’s infancy compared to the other channels and so there’s still much to explore and learn from how people respond over time.
What’s the catch?
As with all content driven sites, the biggest “catch” for all businesses is going to be around resourcing the use of this tool. In order to drive effective engagement with the audience, you will need to be able to maintain regular presence as well as to build creative and cut-through video content, which is not a small task. Many businesses are using Tik Tok already by capturing video content of their daily operations however, this is not the primary experience that users are looking for so is unlikely to maintain or grow engagement for your business. If you’re serious, I’d suggest developing a content strategy and working with a creative agency to develop some specific content designed for this channel. You can keep using Facebook and Instagram for your daily videos as the audience isn’t specifically coming to that platform to view entertaining video content, however, Tik Tok is purely for that purpose, and your content needs to be targeted to what the audience wants otherwise, don’t use it. Tik Tok themselves state that 36% of their Australian users prefer content that is fun and entertaining (Source: https://www.tiktok.com/business/en-AU/insights) which in itself is setting an expectation of how the platform should be utilised. One other important insight is that Tik Tok users want to see honest and truthful reflections of brands (31%) so it’s important that you stay true to your brand when developing content. Not doing this may result in negative brand reflection and, well, let’s just say Tik Tok users aren’t afraid of sharing their experiences (apparently 1.7 times more likely to comment on brands over users in other platforms….)
Should I start using Tik Tok for my business
There are definitely some exciting things that you can do to bring your brand or business to life in Tik Tok, but there’s a few thoughts I recommend you seriously consider before taking the leap:
- Based on the stats above, are your audience Tik Tok users?
- Are you wanting to drive brand awareness over sales?
- Can your brand and/or products fit with creating fun & exciting video content?
- Do you have the time, resource and capability to create that will create a positive reflection of your brand in this channel (remember, fun and exciting video content)?
- Can you maintain creating content for this channel?
- If this isn’t your primary advertising channel, do you have time to do it and everything else?
- Will this channel provide better ROI than an existing one or another one in consideration (based on who you are trying to target, cost to develop and maintain, objective)?
- Based on your overall budget and channel mix, can you afford to include this as part of your marketing strategy?
Answering these questions will help you to establish whether considering adding Tik Tok in to your marketing mix. So if you’re looking to target decision makers born after 1991, your business suits this type of video content and you have the time to build the content, then give it a go! I’d recommend starting with a basic approach in creating Tik Tok videos for your business and seeing what level of engagement you receive before going down the path of investing, especially if you are a small business. I can creatively see a lot of businesses having some fun with content for this channel, even more serious ones might help to deliver cut through to improve on some very dry topics. But, it’s important to think about everything practically and just because this channel has a large audience at the moment, it doesn’t mean that you should definitely be using. Make sure you find that balance of what is going to help you be successful and sometimes that’s only taking on what you are capable of doing well, not trying to do everything with a mediocre approach across all.
Good Luck
The Marketing Elf
©June 2022
Sources referenced for this article:
https://wearesocial.com/au/blog/2022/02/digital-2022-australia-online-like-never-before/
https://www.tiktok.com/business/en-AU/insights
http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/8538-launch-of-tiktok-in-australia-june-2020-202010120023
The Marketing Elf 