How TikTok is Dominating Social Media

By: Jack Hammell

One of the Newer Social Media Apps has Quickly Climbed to the Top and Become One of the Most Preferred Social Media Platforms

TikTok, created in September of 2016 has quickly climbed the ladder of social media platforms. With Twitter and Facebook having years to dominate the social media market, TikTok’s rise to fame has been seemingly unheard of in such a saturated market. This may lead to you asking, how did they do it? Well, the simple answer is, they keep your attention and keep you scrolling.

How TikTok has Captured Everyone’s Attention

TikTok is based on an algorithm that keeps short videos on your “For You Page” that keeps feeding you infinite videos made by not only famous people or content creator, but also just random people. The way that TikTok distributes the videos lets anyone have a chance to be viral. IT promotes different creators all posting what they want because even if you don’t follow someone, you can still see their videos on your feed. Eventually as you scroll, TikTok keeps track of what you keep watching and what you skip and tailors your page to what you like. For example, a lot of my page is sports content because that’s what I like to watch, where as others may be into fashion, video games, how-to videos, or other interests. Based on how much you watch those types of videos it will either show you more or less and tailor what you see to what you like.

How COVID-19 Helped Accelerate Growth

Sounds genius right? Well, this is one of the reasons that TikTok has become so popular in such a short period of time. But also, it caught a bit of a lucky break due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Because everyone was stuck inside, it led to people using the app more and more, because, there was not much else to do. Eventually, trends were made and spread around and it kept people busy and together such a hard and relatively boring time. Whether it was dances, or cooking videos, TikTok was the perfect platform to teach people things when they had nothing to do. Because all the videos are relatively short, they keep your attention and are so easy to consume rather than a long YouTube video. In fact, during the pandemic, TikTok reached over a billion monthly users according to CNBC.

Where can TikTok go from here?

As shown from the graph above, TikTok is now one of the most-used social platforms. It has even surpassed social media giants like Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter. Since TikTok is still relatively young and leading most platforms in ingenuity, one can only assume that TikTok will soon rise even further. Facebook seems to be dying slowly, but are reinventing themselves with the Metaverse so it will be interesting to see how the two compete with each other. TikTok has been reinventing the wheel with how content is delivered to its users. Other platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook have tried to copy with their own sort of “reels” system. With these companies trying to copy, it will be interesting to see if those platforms keep their users on their respective platforms.

Conclusion

TikTok has exploded in the past five years. Overall, it is one of the fastest growing social media platforms in recent history. Many other platforms have tried to copy their success and algorithm to help deliver content to their viewers that they want to see. TikTok is leading the industry right now with picking content tailored specifically to their audiences wants. I estimate that the future of social media will be heavily influenced by the ingenuity of TikTok.

Sources Used:

https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/27/tiktok-reaches-1-billion-monthly-users.html

https://socialtipster.co/reset-tiktok-foryoupage/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/tiktok-facebook-tech-future-chinese-video-app

Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion (2nd Edition) Nahai