The “How” and “Why” of TikTok’s Quick Spread
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-reveals-more-insights-into-how-its-algorithm-recommends-content/585034/
In class, we learned about clusters and how products or ideas can spread form one cluster to another due to various adoption thresholds and network structures. The global adoption of popular social media application, TikTok, as well as the spread of various trends on the app itself to different groups of people relates to this idea and is interesting to analyze.
Spread of TikTok: TikTok began in 2018 when ByteDance, its parent company, bought Musical.ly. Users can lypsinc to a huge list of songs, vocal trends, and popular video clips. They can also create their own videos and sounds, which other users can use as well. ByteDance advertised TikTok on other apps young people use (like Snapchat and Instagram), so this technology spread very quickly among the younger audiences. TikTok also spread easily globally because Musical.ly was popular in the West and Douyin (branded as Tiktok in the West now) was popular in the East. However TikTok really does cater towards the younger demographic, not many people over 30 and without children have even heard about the app. Now, TikTok has gone from 54 million to 689 million users in the past two years.
Spread of Content to Different Clusters: One of the main reasons for the quick adoption of TikTok is its algorithm, which learns about user interests and caters content specifically for each user faster than many other apps. Content on this app spreads very fast because of TikTok’s open network: any video, if popular enough, can show up on anyone else’s For You Page. This allowed TikTok “clusters” to form, where people are brought together by the same type of content they enjoy. For example, I can confidently say some clusters I’m a part of include makeup, fashion, food, and cute baby videos. TikTok shows users in different clusters videos differing in content from their usual feed and tracks engagement. This is done by analyzing direct video interaction (such as “likes” and “shares”) and completion rates of videos. If enough engagement is recorded, then users from one cluster will adopt the content from another cluster and join that cluster as well.
I believe this information is extremely relevant to the cluster module from class. We learned about how technology can spread from one group to another and how this depends on the structure of the network. TikTok was adopted across the world for reasons discussed above, and various types of content spread to different clusters within TikTok due to its complex and effective algorithm. This article exemplifies the extent to which products/ideas can be spread and how quickly this can happen with an app as popular and well-made as TikTok. This spread, however, only reached certain age demographics (younger people), so that shows the maximum reach of this tech–the large cluster that TikTok resides within is largely limited to young people. Lastly, through our analysis, we also saw that content spread within TikTok is far-reaching. All it takes is for an individual to “like” a video or watch the entirety of it for that type of newer content to spread to the individual in this cluster.