Breaking Down the TikTookay Playbook to Take on Instagram (and Everyone Else)
With dozens of apps competing for customers’ consideration, TikTookay is the newest front-runner in the battle to maintain individuals scrolling. The Chinese-owned video app is the fastest-growing social media platform of all time, with roughly 80 million month-to-month energetic customers.
With its ForYou web page built for discoverability, short-form movies, and a heart-shaped “like” button, you would possibly mistake TikTookay for simply one other Instagram. Although TikTookay is most definitely making an attempt to overtake the photo-sharing app, this isn’t solely the battle of Instagram vs. TikTok. In reality, Instagram is discovering TikTok much harder to knock off than platforms like Snapchat. TikTookay desires to be the No. 1 social platform in the world — and it has the benefit of studying from its opponents’ previous errors.
Let’s check out TikTookay’s playbook for turning into the better of the finest in the social media world.
Step 1: Poach the smartest individuals in each room.
The first a part of TikTookay’s technique has concerned recruiting high expertise from different social media giants to recreate their successes. The firm has already hired dozens of ex-employees from Facebook and Google, together with Blake Chandlee, Facebook’s former vp of worldwide partnerships.
Trevor Johnson, former director of selling operations at Instagram, is now the head of selling in Europe for TikTookay, and David Hoctor jumped ship from Facebook to work on TikTookay’s model partnerships. While expertise poaching isn’t uncommon in Silicon Valley, these latest hires and early initiatives are robust indicators that the way forward for TikTookay hinges on its potential to construct an advert answer that competes with the likes of Facebook.
Marketers acquainted with each platforms discover TikTookay’s ad-buying interface bears an uncanny resemblance to Facebook’s. If you know the way to make Facebook adverts work in your model, TikTookay is a pure arrow to add to your efficiency advertising quiver.
Step 2: Build a greater advert platform.
TikTookay appeared to understand early that it might construct the product of each Facebook engineer’s desires if that they had the advantage of expertise. By the time Facebook launched its advert platform in 2007, Google had already created an extremely compelling mannequin with AdSense. To compete, Facebook lured in giant holding corporations with enticingly low CPMs. By the time the news broke that Facebook had been inflating its metrics, the firm had efficiently grown its advert platform into one in every of the largest in the world.
The platform had managed to construct a few of the most sturdy person profiles in existence. Whenever publishers put in Facebook’s software program growth equipment, Facebook would extract and retailer knowledge from every of these sources. Once it had a huge knowledge pool, it had one other compelling supply for advertisers.
Like Facebook, TikTookay gathers a wealth of data on its customers and depends on data-driven decision-making to inform its subsequent strikes. More than that, TikTookay has established its standing as an advert platform, rounding up an impressive roster of advertisers and announcing a global partnership with WPP. It’s clear that, in quite a few methods, TikTookay is carefully adhering to the Facebook/Google blueprint to problem their present oligopoly.
Step 3: Craft a story of positivity.
Another means TikTookay has differentiated itself from its predecessors is by making a narrative of positivity. TikTookay’s tagline “Make your day” clearly communicates its mission to construct a social community the place customers can escape the 24-hour information cycle, and the content material on TikTookay typically displays that.
Americans significantly wrestle with information fatigue, and there are hardly any corners of the web the place individuals can escape the political division and ugliness. When customers open the TikTookay app, although, they gained’t see Antifa or QAnon posts. They’re extra doubtless to see a video of Shaquille O’Neal dancing or a humorous prank captured on digicam. TikTookay’s creators have managed to build a platform that’s simply as addictive as Facebook — with out the negativity.
The Challenges Ahead
Despite its early success, TikTookay will nonetheless face many challenges shifting ahead. Its month-to-month utilization has already surpassed the period of time spent on Facebook and Instagram, however its every day energetic person base numbers in the tens of hundreds of thousands — far fewer than Instagram’s greater than 500 million customers and Facebook’s 1.85 billion.
As TikTookay grows, it would have to develop this base so manufacturers evaluating social media instruments for advertising and promoting not query whether or not their goal audiences are utilizing the app. TikTookay has a repute for being a youth-centric platform, and it’ll have to seize the consideration of customers older than 24 to preserve its rise to the high. More particularly, the battle of Instagram vs. TikTookay will boil down to which platforms customers have the most disposable earnings.
In its quest to develop a aggressive advert platform, TikTookay should additionally keep away from something related to the caustic narrative that developed round Facebook. After Facebook turned off notifications for video games like “FarmVille,” it burned bridges in its accomplice ecosystem — and the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and unhealthy publicity from “The Social Dilemma” movie has created public mistrust. To discover extra success than the long-established social media big, TikTookay could have to keep away from being tied up in related scandals and adverse associations.
While it stays to be seen whether or not TikTookay will quickly be higher than Instagram or Facebook, the way forward for TikTookay appears to be like shiny. It has assembled a group of sensible minds in social networking, and it has been profitable in carving out an area for lighthearted content material and positivity. The playbook TikTookay is following is tried and true, and the platform has the advantage of hindsight.
We’ll all have to watch to see what occurs as the platform writes its personal playbook and works to make it to the high.
Brian Freeman is the CEO and founding father of Heartbeat, a market that connects manufacturers with actual shoppers to run influencer-style campaigns on TikTookay or Instagram. Heartbeat has greater than 340,000 on-demand model ambassadors for launching turnkey ambassador options.
