By the time you are reading the headline, it must be apparent which social media we’re speaking about. Instagram hit 1 billion monthly active users and right now, it’s still “an influencer’s platform”. Instagram has always focused mainly on the “aesthetic” of profiles, most popular influencers on Instagram are models or people who belong to the Kim Kardashian family and most number of influencers invest heavily into getting their feeds “appealing to the eye”. So currently, the most number of influencer brand deals happening are because of the influence that the user has on Instagram’s audience.
Tiktok, however, is taking a different approach. After being ridiculed heavily by a certain urban section of India’s population, Tiktok is now getting noticed by Instagram influencers as more and more Instagram “viewers” are considering Tiktok as a platform to consume content. And TikTok is leveraging this “Fear of Missing out” to increase its user base exponentially.
But, is it a platform for influencers yet? On loose terms, a platform suitable for influencers is where they can create content promoting brands. TikTok’s “Do stuff to this background music” style of content might open up a new form of avenue for brands to market with. Mountain Dew, a famous beverage by Coca-cola did heavy influencer marketing on TikTok and it is apparent the kind of brand awareness benefits they must have reaped out of it by the number of views, comments, and shares on it.
Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about TikTok:
So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.
TikTok is yet to become an influencer’s platform beating Instagram because more brands are yet to be open to promotion on the platform. But it’s not long before brands get to understand the potential of reaching out to potential customers on the platform and TikTok grows as an influencer’s platform.
