TikTok Advertisment with Strong/Weak Ties? Triadic Closure?
TikTok has become very successful in just two years. According to Harvard Business Review, TikTok has emerged to rival companies like Netflix, Youtube, Snapchat, and even Facebook including more than one billion downloads in 150 markets worldwide and 75 languages. On the TikTok app, there are homemade videos that are shown from comedy to lip syncing, to life hacks that people use on a daily basis for normal everyday life tasks. Many TikTok videos are even shared on other platforms like instagram and snapchat. In class, we recently learned about weak and strong ties and even the triadic closure which can be applied to how TikTok works and how these concepts link to TikTok’s success.
Strong ties with friends and family members have a big impact on people that download the app. For instance, the people that you share very strong ties with that have TikTok will most likely influence and convince you to download TikTok. This relates to the Triadic Closure Property that we learned in lecture. For example, if one of your good friends follows two other friends on the TikTok platform, the two other friends will eventually follow each other over time because they have a common friend that both follows them and they both know that good friend. Those two friends who become friends over time and follow each other eventually continue to share TikTok videos and even influence the continuing network of friends to download TikTok or follow each other.
According to Mark Granovetter, he states the “The strength of weak ties”. Jobs are found through weak ties and not strong ties. You know all the people your close friends know but your acquaintances have connections to a whole new social network that you’re not connected to. You will most likely find a job through your acquaintances (weak ties) and not close friends (strong ties). In this case, it also applies to TikTok. For instance, the people that you share strong ties with on TikTok (close friends) know the same information as you on the platform. You are able to share TikTok videos on other social media platforms like snapchat and instagram since it has a share button that many users click on. TikTok allows for sharing videos which applies to weak ties because videos are being spread on any other platform allowing for advertisement and more prospective users to download the app through seeing TikTok videos everywhere on the media.
Source:
https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-strategy-behind-tiktoks-global-rise
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch03.pdf