TikTok is a social network similar to Instagram. Instead of pictures, however, short, self-made videos are accompanied by music. People often dance or sing along synchronously. In the meantime, however, TikTok is no longer just about music and dance. News, fashion and comedy are also essential topics on TikTok.
The Chinese Alex Zhu and his friend Luyu Yang came up with the idea of developing an app. The development of the app “Cicada” took about six months. The idea was to publish short videos with educational content.
The “Cicada” project was not successful. Alex Zhu did not give up, however. He developed a new idea for an app where teenagers could record videos of music and use emojis or other filters.
In just one month, the team around Alex Zhu developed the app Musical.ly, released in 2014 and achieved great success. In 2017, the app was sold to ByteDance and subsequently renamed TikTok.
ByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company based in Beijing. BuzzVideo and VigoVideo also belong to the company.
Today’s stars of the social media world have achieved their fame not only through YouTube or Instagram but also through TikTok.
Similar to Instagram, it is about entertaining and easily digestible content. Since the videos are usually limited to a length of 10 seconds, new impressions are always pelting the user.
Why is it so popular?
This video clip channel offers straightforward and intuitive handling.
Users can skip other users or specific hashtags but lose themselves for hours in the automatically starting short videos.
In this sense, the video channel is reminiscent of a contemporary television version. Another critical success factor is the app’s musical focus.
Last but not least, the social media channel has yet to be flooded with advertising.
Who is on TikTok?
According to TikTok Media, it is predominantly women under 24 who use it in Europe.
The figures range from 55% to over 60% women, depending on the country. According to the latest user figures, TikTok has over one billion users and is growing fast.
The most active users are in America, with 138 million, although the somewhat crazy President Donald Trump wanted to stop this success path.
What is crazy is that users spend 95 minutes daily on this platform.
We are also on TikTok as consumers, we are in the minority by age, but we enjoy the exciting clips. Unlike the lying media, at least with TikTok you have fun.
We would not be surprised if the tiktok is working on a kind of metaverse idea such as Upland making the clips even 3-D.