How Social Ties Keep TikTok Alive
We’re all familiar with the growth of popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Like other social media sites, the more people that a user can connect to, the more that user’s content becomes personalized based on their friends’ activities. For this reason, people are more inclined to use social media platforms that other people are using: more users allow for better algorithms and better user experiences. A recently popular app, TikTok, seems to use this network effect to capture people’s attention through relevant, personalized, and quick video content.
The existence of many weak ties between users on TikTok ultimately allows the platform to continue growing in the entertainment industry. To start, TikTok has a feature that allows users to add on to existing videos through reactions, duets, screen recordings, etc. These “add ons” not only make the original content, funnier, more interesting, and overall better, but they extend the network of weak ties. While users on TikTok may not be close friends with one another, their distant relationships as weak ties allow users to easily and briefly connect to new content and individuals. In the case of the TikTok reaction and duet feature, when a user duets an existing TikTok video, they are continuing to spread the original content with other distant users who will then share the content with their close friends. This network allows a various groups of close friends to find TikTok content that they enjoy. TikTok continues to use weak ties to expand its platform through the ability to share videos on other social media platforms like Instagram stories and reels. This feature allows people to share content with their Instagram followers, many of which are weak ties — once again starting a new chain of weak tie sharing.
While it is more easily believed that sharing content via strong ties has a greater impact than weak ties, TikTok’s success proves the effectiveness of weak tie relationships in society. The nature of TikTok’s short, but impactful videos allows for content to be shared across large networks of weak ties that continue to keep social media users amused and captivated.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/01/content-network-effect/