Since the beginning of 2020, the hashtag #tiktokmademebuyit has spread on social networks: “I bought it TikTok”. The motto refers to the persuasive power of TikTok, the most popular social network among teenagers, born in China in 2016 and focused on the sharing of short videos by users. Thanks to its billion of active users every month all over the world, and to the characteristics that distinguish it, TikTok is able to convey commercial messages capable of determining the consumption choices of millions of people, giving life to fashions that spread among its users very quickly and then dissolve just as quickly.
Alongside the videos in which users dance to the notes of the songs of the moment, others in which they mime the lips of popular phrases and still others that show jokes and challenges of all kinds, on the app there are widespread product reviews by the so-called “recommendations. influencer “, users who specialize in trying and then recommending products from specific niches, attracting an interested audience and in some cases managing to make this activity a very profitable job.
So far, nothing new: this type of influencer has also been present for years on platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, and an increasing portion of the advertising budgets of companies is assigned to what in the jargon is called influencer marketing, that is the creation advertising campaigns involving these influencers.
However, as the US online newspaper Vox has pointed out, TikTok has specific characteristics that often mean that products that have gone viral on the platform are often sold out of physical and online stores within hours or at most days of the birth of these trends. Physical stores dedicated to these products have even been born: in Manhattan they are grouping in a neighborhood that has already taken the informal name of TikTok Block (TikTok neighborhood).
This dynamic, observed by Vox in the United States but similar to the one that in China according to Bloomberg has affected a large number of agricultural products on the Chinese version of the app, Douyin, has several causes.
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First of all there is the algorithm that is used by the app to decide what content to show to users, and how. Despite being secret and constantly evolving, Vox claims that it is able to identify users' tastes more effectively than those of the competition, which allows the platform to offer relevant content for the user, increasing the effectiveness of the message conveyed by the influencers.
The mechanism that causes a video to go viral on TikTok works more or less like this: the app shows it to a small group of people on the “For you” screen, where the user finds an endless list of content that could be of interest to him. and that often ends up becoming the place in the app where he spends most of his time. If the people to whom the video is shown interact with it, the algorithm shows it to other users and so on, generating a ripple effect that can lead to a video being viewed by millions of people in a matter of hours. However, most of the videos produced do not pass the first phase, thus ending up in oblivion. This means that the videos that users see on the “For You” screen are often the result of a selection made based on the demonstrations of interest of a large number of other users, which tends to reinforce the ripple effect.
The second reason is the shortness of the videos, which can last up to one minute. This limit is much lower than those of platforms like YouTube, and makes creating content much easier and more immediate. To produce a video in which you review a product on YouTube, even given the standards that users of the platform are accustomed to, you usually need a good video camera, a good microphone, video editing software and a minimum of technical skills. On TikTok the videos are more informal, you don't pay much attention to quality, and can therefore be produced much more easily, with a simple smartphone.
According to Vox, this gives influencer videos on TikTok an edge over those on other platforms: greater authenticity, which helps the influencer gain credibility with their followers and build a stronger bond with them than on other platforms. This makes advertising messages delivered by TikTok influencers more effective, because people tend to shop on the advice of people they trust.
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This is even more true for the so-called “micro-influencers”, users with a number of followers ranging from one thousand to twenty thousand and who tend to specialize in a specific sector, such as face make-up or vintage clothes (two categories of products on whose sales TikTok has had a strong impact in the last year and a half): speaking to a fairly small and homogeneous audience, this type of influencer manages to obtain very high levels of interaction with their content (in jargon: engagement rate), which gives reviewed products a higher chance of going viral.
The third reason lies in some specific features of the app, which help content spread very quickly. For example on TikTok you can make duets, which consist in publishing a content in which the user shows a video published by someone else alongside another product by himself. This feature gives you the ability to reply to an original video with your own video, and can lead to chains of duets that lead to the original video going viral. In the case of product reviews, it often happens that other users respond to an initial review with a duet in which they add their opinion, or in which they test the reviewed product in turn. A long chain of positive reviews can easily lead a product to go viral and be out of stock within hours or days. A feature that has similar effects is that of stitching (translated: sewing), which allows you to insert someone else's video pieces into your video, referring to the original.
The downside to this technology, from a commercial point of view, is that the fashions it brings to life are short-lived. Just search on Google Trends for some of the products that have seen their popularity expand rapidly thanks to TikTok to see how this usually goes up and down in a very short amount of time.
However, this does not seem to discourage the marketing departments of companies, increasingly attracted by the potential offered by the unique features of TikTok. As an influencer told Vox, makeup brand Maybelline proposed that she try a new mascara and make a video in which she said what she thought. When the video went viral, the company offered her in the tens of thousands of dollars to use the video to promote her product for six months.
Also to Vox, a 22-year-old influencer who has made more than a million dollars in the last year said that 99 percent of requests from marketing departments are about TikTok rather than Instagram, which she is also active on.
It is therefore not surprising that TikTok is testing a feature that will allow users to make purchases directly on the app. This would reduce even more the time and the steps that pass from the conviction through the review to the purchase of the product, making the platform an even more powerful advertising tool. On the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, which has already implemented this type of functionality, has been made purchases for 26 billion dollars in the first year after implementation.
