TikTok’s Booming Success — Where Did It Come From?
Everyone with a phone and an online presence has at least heard of TikTok. It’s the newest, viral success social media that allows its users to post, share, and view short videos tied to music or sound. Much of this success is due to the platform’s ease of use. It’s incredibly easy to pick up the application, create a small piece of content that’s entertaining, funny, interesting, or even prolific, and send it off into the world to become a hit. TikTok has even made stars of many of its users doing just this. But how did it skyrocket to popularity so quickly?
Forbes claims that TikTok’s rise to widespread use has everything to do with its marketing. It learned what worked and didn’t work in advertising, especially that of social media, and worked off of that to push downloads as cost-effectively as it could. Gone were the massive, multi-million dollar TV ads, as TikTok found snappy social media adverts to be much more effective. It’s success also built off of that of Vine — the base of the application, as well as how it was used, as proven before it even existed, which allowed TikTok to be the new place to go for those looking to browse an app like Vine, which had shut down years prior to TikTok’s release.
However, it seems likely that a lot of this growth had everything to do with the network’s effect on the market. As we’ve discussed in class, a network’s effect on a market has equilibria, each of which act as tipping points. Social media users would see their friends, colleagues, role-models, and even family on TikTok, giving the illusion that everyone was using it. A greater perceived usage of the application, combined with the low ‘price’ of being free and the high value of entertaining content gave TikTok’s sales great longevity, as the platform continues to grow to this day.
Overall, it’s hard to ascertain whether TikTok’s success can be completely tied to its marketing campaigns or if it was largely due to timing and the network’s effects. But it’s easy to be certain that the network had at least some success on the application’s landmark user base growth.
Source:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2020/01/31/tiktok-why-the-enormous-success/?sh=24f86a1465d1