The year is 2020. Depending where you lived, you might have spent some time in lockdowns with very little to do. In a time when doom-scrolling and the negative news cycle were impacting the mental health of many, one platform focused on sharing positive content: TikTok. It might have started out as the humble platform Gen Z posted their dance videos on, but during Covid, TikTok became a source of entertainment for many.
Now in 2024 and with the world largely back to the way it was, TikTok continues to build momentum as a social media platform. Here, we’ll explore why testing TikTok as a channel as part of your media strategy could benefit your business.
It continues to increase in popularity
Despite covid-mandated lockdowns ending and life returning to normal, TikTok continues to grow in popularity and is still the fastest-growing social media platform in Australia. In 2024, 40%, or 9.73M people aged 16-64 are active TikTok users, spending 42 hours per month on TikTok. So not only are they active, but they are engaged. For comparison, time spent on YouTube is half that at 21 hours per month.
It has influence over its audience
As an advertiser, the end goal of any advertising activity is to get the audience to purchase your goods or services. Granted, TikTok isn’t the industry leader in e-comm solutions when compared to Facebook and Google, but it does influence its audience.
For example, GenX+ users of TikTok (P45+) are 2.3x more likely to buy something they have seen on TikTok compared to other social media platforms. It doesn’t mean they convert on TikTok, but TikTok is the channel that influenced that purchase outcome.
TikTok users also trust their peers for feedback and reviews of items they are considering purchasing, to the point that they actively seek this content out on the platform. This could be an important creative angle to focus on should you test advertising on TikTok.
It’s accessible to new advertisers
One piece of feedback we often hear when we suggest TikTok as an advertising channel is ‘we don’t have assets for it’ or ‘we don’t have an account/profile’. Fun fact: you don’t need an account or profile to run TikTok ads, unless you plan to post organically and manage your community. You will need to have a business account, but you don’t need an organic user profile to do this.
As for the assets, TikTok have worked hard to reduce barriers of entry. Similarly to Facebook, TikTok has a video editor suite where advertisers can produce TikTok-optimised content using snippets of video or a combination of static images. This ability to create best-practice creative without producing a new video asset addresses one of the major challenges with adding a new platform to the media mix.
Additionally, TikTok has the creator marketplace, which connects advertisers with content creators. There are two ways this can be leveraged for ads. First, you can explore the creator marketplace to see if someone who is on the marketplace is already talking about and promoting your product organically. From here, brands can negotiate usage rights for a fee to use this content in their ads.
Alternatively, you can also upload a brief to the marketplace and invite content creators to respond to the brief. This option will give brands opportunity to help produce the content with some guidance as opposed to using something that already exists.
What about what is happening in the US? Isn’t TikTok going to be banned?
While the US has ruled that the owners of TikTok, Bytedance, have to sell the platform to non-Chinese buyers or face the app being banned, there are a couple of key reasons why we don’t think this will happen.
Firstly some background: The US government has been trying to ban or force the sale of TikTok for some time now. All the way back in 2020 when Trump was president, both major political parties have been trying to force the hand of Bytedance citing ‘national security’. Something that is less publicised is that this ‘concern for national security’ was lobbied to the U.S. government by two U.S owned companies. Any guesses? Yep, it was Meta (Facebook, Instagram and WhasApp) and Alphabet (Google).
One would argue Meta and Alphabet have the most to gain from TikTok being banned. YouTube put all their eggs in the wrong basket by trying to compete with linear TV. Now they have had to backtrack, with the launch of Shorts as a competitor to TikTok. And Facebook is losing users in the US to TikTok, so the best way to stop this is to ban them or buy them (Meta have great form on the latter).
Don't count TikTok out yet
Finally, from a consumer point of view, TikTok has a huge and loyal user base in the US, where audiences are now actively detracting from the likes of Facebook and Instagram. Creators want to publish their content on TikTok as it is easier and fairer to monetise their content through the TikTok creator fund, a criticism many content creators have made about Facebook over the years.
Audiences love using TikTok because they find the content shown to them is relevant to them, which runs directly counter to another criticism of Facebook, which has been accused in recent times prioritising ad revenue over audience engagement.
Based on this, we think a ban on the platform would be tricky to enforce. If not from a legal perspective, then definitely from a civil unrest perspective as there is culturally, growing disquiet over the government’s apparent overreaching into what its civilians can and cannot do.
Trust Retain Media for Industry-Leading Insights
If you’re wondering if TikTok is a good fit for your advertising strategy, we can help. At Retain Media, our team of ad managers and social media specialists are experienced at designing campaigns that work across channels to maximise your ad budget and deliver conversions.
For more information, contact us today to arrange a free, no-obligation consultation and find out how we can make TikTok work for you.
