Why Is It Time To Get Your Brand On TikTok?

TikTok is in its golden phase. Its total number of monthly active US users jumped 800% between January 2018 and June 2020, to 91 million active monthly users. In March 2019, TikTok users between 18-34 were 50.3% of all users, while users between 45-64 made up 26.1%. By March 2020, young adults accounted for 65.3% and older people 18.5% of all U.S. TikTok users. This makes TikTok a ripe environment for any brand to market itself.

Even as TikTok starts to expand in age range, younger users are growing as the largest TikTok demographic, but older TikTok influencers are making names for themselves as well. They are generating enough data for us to understand how they use TikTok.

A great marketer knows that the absolutely only way to remain ahead of the competition is to have a proactive approach towards putting together marketing strategies. Making use of TikTok for your business is rather a prolific calculated decision as opposed to a straight-out bold hunch.

Early adopters of Instagram and Snapchat had showed that if brands are able to identify, and leverage a social media platform throughout its initial days, you are easily able to become an influencer, and be able to make the most from marketing on that platform.

What is TikTok?

TikTok is a social network built which is built around video sharing.

A lot of the first TikTok users migrated from Vine, which is a video-sharing platform that is focused on 6-second looping micro-videos. Unfortunately, Vine shut its doors abruptly in 2017.

In a similar fashion to Vine, most TikTok content consists of short video clips. The variety of videos that you’ll find on this social media platform in endless. You’ll find:

• Lip-sync videos,
• Make-up tutorials,
• Viral dance trends,
• Political commentary, as well as
• More cat videos than you could ever watch in a lifetime.

In terms of content on TikTok, the service is very similar to YouTube, however the social media elements are closer to Instagram. TikTok feeds scroll by very quickly and are very varied.

How Are Users Making TikTok Different?

TikTok content began as Gen-Z teens lip-syncing and dancing. After this, the content and influencers began to grow in the usual niches which lend themselves to great visuals:

• Food,
• Fashion, as well as
• Beauty

Older audiences have begun to develop new TikTok niches, such as medicine/wellness and real estate. Here, they produce educational and demo content.

There’s also a growing niche of parents and families posting content together. Parents use TikTok to talk about parenting tips and what products they love that make their life easier. Although TikTok is predominantly younger audiences, we see generational crossover looking at popular TikTok hashtags surrounding family and parenting, like #dad and #family.

This crossover hints that the TikTok audience will continue to age up. With older users, TikTok will become more relevant for more brands, as users begin to explore more product categories on the platform.

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