Tik Tok: A comprehensive look (2020)
TL;DR — Tik Tok is at its core an audio-based short-form performative video platform. The real innovation lies in its recommendation system. Its next steps would be to focus on user retention, as well as fending off competitors.
Heralded as the break-out app of the last two years, Tiktok’s rapid expansion across the world is a phenomenon to be reckoned with. In 2019, Tik Tok’s cumulative downloads has reached 1.5 billion, making it one of the most downloaded apps in recent years. Drawing heavily upon remix culture and bass heavy music, Tiktok’s platform and it’s “signature” recommendation engine churns out trends and content at an alarming pace. In just three years of operation (of course, not including its time as Musical.ly), Tiktok boasts around 637 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) globally. (In contrast, Instagram took 6.5 years to reach those numbers.) Needless to say, TikTok’s staggering growth has drawn the attention of not just a few tech executives.
Although equivalent in scale and popularity — or perhaps soon to be — to SNS behemoths like Facebook and Instagram, it would be wrong to classify Tiktok strictly as a “social media network”. At its core, Tik Tok is a social entertainment site based primarily around short-form performative videos. The key word here is “performative”. Sites like Facebook and Instagram are based upon the life-log model, where users share with each other snippets of their lives. Tik Tok is less about biographical sharing, but more about performance and entertainment. Most popular content on TikTok revolve around lipsyncing/dance, comedy, parody, viral videos, and memes. This contrasts starkly to Facebook content, for instance, which features short posts about one’s life, links to articles or videos, and pictures of holidays. As Constine notes in Tech Crunch, “TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that’s vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a selfie, show something pretty or pan around what you’re up to. TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Insta.”
Many have commented that Tik Tok shares many similarities with Vine, which is true. In some ways, Tik Tok simply filled the gap that Vine left after its closure (in the Western world). Yet, there are still key differences. The most important of which: Tik Tok uses audio as a departure point of creativity. Music, or audio samples, form a key part of the user experience. Trends and challenges are often created out of audio samples alone. It might even be more accurate to think of TikTok less as a video platform than an audio remixing platform that happens to use video as an output channel. And the founders of Tiktok all know this: in all three names of this platform (Musical.ly, Douyin, and TikTok), aural references are made (Dou Yin translates to vibrating tones). On Tik Tok, creativity originates from audio and culminates in video. In nowhere in the history of social media apps has this much primacy been given to audio.
Because of Tik Tok’s audio-centric culture, we notice stark differences in the underlying ethos, or culture, of the app. TikTok has been described to be “unusually fun” and dynamic, precisely because music is a core element of it. If social media platforms based around life-logging satisfies our desire to share and be part of other people’s lives, TikTok satisfies our desires for light hearted humour and laughter, of raw, unfiltered content. There is connection, still, but the connection it brings is rather different. On TikTok, we feel like we are all pulses riding on shared music vocabulary, everyone a community of wannabes, ordinary people, having fun with their 15 seconds of obviously staged fame. If Instagram is about being unique and standing out — and in some ways, actively curating your personal brand — Tik Tok is about showing that you’re a chill person who’s not afraid of letting your guard down, being silly, showing your ugly side to the world, and not having to feel like you’re unique. Symbolic capital on Instagram trades on cool, flex, and status; whereas Tiktok’s currency is goofy, fun, and lighthearted.
One more interesting differentiation is this: Instagram is most often a solo activity. You’re in a cafe, you snap a picture. You’re at a transition stage of your life, you post a nice picture with some heartfelt caption. It communicates a snapshot of your own life. TikTok, however, is very often a group activity. It has become a ritual, something that young people do, together. And in the history of social media apps, this is fairly unchartered territory. Tiktok often brings people together physically. You have to cajole your friend into acting out your storyboard or dance challenge. And Tik Tok marketing team knows it- for it has incorporated many of these more “social” features into their new filters and challenges.
©Leibing Guo
To further illustrate just exactly what kind of social media is Tik Tok, we can do a deeper comparison of its key energies to other players in the social media landscape. Referring to the figure above, in the bottom left quadrant we have Instagram. Instagram is a highly curated platform, where users are by and large conscious of their “public” appearance. Photos have to be nice, they have to look attractive, and the predominant culture is to post only well taken photos, as those have the most likes. Pictures are carefully curated to show only one side of their lives to the public, a side that is often more glamorous than in real life — the so-called, social media “mask”. Instagram also lies closer to the biographical axis because they are, fundamentally, about sharing life moments. However, compared to platforms like Blogger, or even Wechat Moments, these snippets of someone’s life are often shallower, because of its image centric medium.
In contrast, in the top right quadrant, we have Tik tok, which is a raw and performative kind of media. By “Raw”, it does not mean that videos are completely unfiltered or that people do not care about their ‘image’ at all. People still put on lots of make up and don their hair when doing various challenges on Tiktok. It does mean, however, not being bothered by where you are, who you’re with, or small things like how random or cluttered things in your surroundings are. Or at least, not being afraid of showing that you’re just another ordinary person in an ordinary setting. Contrasting this to Instagram, where it’s all about showing the world how extraordinary you are, in whichever extraordinary place, hanging with whomsoever — Tik Tok is about ordinary people in ordinary settings living it up.
Which is why Tik Tok is way closer to Snapchat (or Insta Stories) on the Raw/Curated axis than other social media apps. However, the difference between Snapchat and Tik Tok is that the former is directly built to be meant for close friends. Tik Tok is designed for public audience. The fact that people do not have any reservations in bringing out the raw, unfiltered side of themselves out for public consumption also testifies to a new era of social media publics. Of course, we mustn’t underestimate the efforts of Tik Tok’s marketing team in priming its audience to break out of their comfort zone and dancing like the influencers they see on their #foryoupage.
Tik Tok’s Recommendation System
Tik Tok’s content recommendation architecture contributes greatly to the distinctive flavour of the user experience. Powered by Bytedance’s ‘signature’ AI recommender system, the Tik Tok Feed moves away from the “Friend-based” approach to content towards a never ending series of what Tik Tok thinks you’ll like based on what it knows of you. In other words, it took a gamble in skipping the “social phase” of a social network’s development, where users have to follow others and scope out content before being shown things. This is an important innovation from a historic point of view. The upside, for the user, is that you’ll never be starved of “popular” content. The downside, is that all these does not feel very “social”. The connection element, a core feature of Facebook and Instagram, is missing from the start. Yet, some social media veterans say this is a shrewd move: “It’s doing the thing that Twitter tried to solve, that everyone tried to solve,” he said. (Ankur Thakkar, the former editorial lead at Vine)“How do you get people to engage?” Apparently you just … show them things, and let a powerful artificial intelligence take notes. You start sending daily notifications immediately. You tell them what to do. You fake it till you make it, algorithmically speaking.” Tik Tok took a gamble in letting an AI take control of its feed, and by doing so, managed to create a “social media network” that is not quite based on individual connections and friend networks that characterized traditional social media platforms.
One perk of having an AI feed is that it is relatively easy to build momentum around specific cultures. Users are, from the get go, inundated with challenges, specific hashtags, and popular songs. Everyone is encouraged to create their own interpretation of trends, songs, or dances. This is good news from a commercial perspective. Advertisers love creating their own hashtags and challenges and hoping that it goes viral. However, one of the downsides of this, is that users often see the same thing dozens of times, and fatigue kicks in faster than on other platforms. There is only x amount times you can see someone doing the Say So dance before you get really, really tired of it.
In the Western version of TikTok (excluding Douyin, and TikTok India), Tiktok’s user base is fairly young. In the US, 60% of TikTok users are aged between 16–24. In contrast, over 60% of the users are 25–44 in China. India sees 41% between 16–24. The differential in age groups contributes significantly to the differences in kinds of content that you’ll see, depending on which part of the world you’re in. Western Tik Tok — which includes Singapore — is more focused on dance remixes and youth culture. TikTok India and China, on the other hand, are stronger in comedy content, parody videos, and even news. Therefore, if you’re an older person in the West(read, 18 and above), it is likely that Tik Tok might not appeal to you, as its content is remarkably dominated by “young people stuff”. All these could be a result of design. Many big players have made recent attempts to capture the preteen demographic as the rapid increase of smartphone ownership amongst preteens. Snapchat’s SnapKidz, YouTube Kids and most recently Facebook’s Messenger Kids all focused on creating a “child-friendly” version of the main app.The creators of Musical.ly — when it was still called Musical.ly — did their homework. They not only identified potential future users of the app, but also non-users that might hamper their success. In order to reach preteen audiences, social media apps need to get past the gatekeepers of preteen online engagement: the parents. The conspicuous lack of more mature content in Western Tik Tok could be a result of deliberate choice.
Tik Tok’s internationalization strategy
The story of Tik Tok’s growth holds many lessons for people interested in social media internationalization strategy. According to people familiar with Tik Tok’s development in China, Tik Tok, in the very first six months since its launch, focused primarily on content operation. In particular, its entire operations team was made to reach out to internet influencers. Over time they managed to rope in around 300 internet influencers from the short video app Xiaokaxiu, Weibo, a micro blog, the lip-syncing app Musical.ly and art colleges, who were then asked by Tik Tok to create contents based on the themes it designed. This was basically how Tik Tok built up its initial content pool. During its overseas expansion, Tik Tok took this approach to a whole new level by going after only the most popular internet influencers and stars. These internet influencers and stars, who has amassed an established pool of followers and content distribution channels, and are, in a way, an icon of the local culture, served as a key stepping stone for Tik Tok’s initial development abroad. In Indonesia, for example, Tik Tok organized an offline gathering of 100+ stars and bloggers on the day of its launch, in an attempt to bond with these content creators. Likewise, Tik Tok’s operation team in Thailand had managed to scoop up some seasoned content creators on Instagram, who eventually became the very first users of Tik Tok.
All these efforts paid off. Within just two years, 1 in 7 people in Thailand have Tik Tok. It has amassed 65 million active users in India, 29 million in Pakistan, and has strong presence in Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, Turkey, and Egypt. It is available in 75 languages. All these are amazing feats.
Growing Pains
However, one thing that Tik Tok still suffers from, crucially, is user retention. Take a look, for instance, at its MAU/Cumulative Downloads figures.
Source: App Annie
MAU (Monthly Active User)/Cumulative Download gives us an idea of how many monthly active users are retained on the app out of all those that have downloaded over a long period of time. It approximates long run value after sharp increases or decreases are normalized. In 2016, there was a sharp spike in MAU/CD, reflective actually of the sharp rise in downloads — over time, those who have downloaded stopped using the app, and MAU/CD fell to around 5% in 2018, before gradually rising again to 15% in 2019. Taking the period between 2018 to 2019 as a key indicator of how appealing a social media to the population at large (based on the assumption that two years is a good approximation of long run trajectories), we can say that it roughly averages to around 10%. This means that only 10% of those that have downloaded Tiktok actually sees value in TikTok’s product in its current manifestation, meaning that conversely, 90% of those reached by Tik Tok’s marketing efforts find that Tik Tok provides them no value at all.
What about short run retention rate?
Source: App Annie
Based on the diagram above, we see that TikTok’s 30 day retention is around 4% in late 2019. This means that TikTok only manages to retain 4% of the people who download the app, which is even lower than its long term retention calculated above. However, it is important to note the average retention rate in the industry is in fact 4%.
Source: App Annie
Let’s take a look at how Tiktok performs for the users who find value in it using the DAU/MAU metrics. DAU (Daily Active Users)/MAU measures stickiness, or the percentage of people that return on a daily basis per month. The DAU/MAU is a popular metric of user engagement — 20% is said to be good (6/30 days), 50% world class (Most use 15/30 days). In China, India, and Pakistan, Tiktok has DAU/MAU of ~45%, which is fairly decent, but slightly lower than Facebook/Whatsapp’s by around 10%..This means that users use the app on average around 14 days a month on average in its top demographics. Outside of its core demographics, DAU/MAU drops substantially to around the 35% range, which means people only use it for 10 days a month on average. This shows that out of those that do find value in it, they use the app about once every two or three days, which is a promising sign.
However, far less people use TikTok every day than other social media apps. According to Apptopia, TikTok’s engagement rate — defined as percentage of the MAUs that use the app daily — is 29%, far lower than Facebook’s 96%, Instagram’s 95%, and Snapchat’s 95%. This means that there are fewer “hardcore” users, or “habitual users”, for TikTok than for apps that are more ingrained in people’s lifestyles like Facebook and Instagram.
All these paint us a picture of TikTok where, despite its massive growth, it is not able to provide value to a majority of the population that wants to give it a — it is more of a “niche” app at this stage. Of course, this figures differ vastly according to countries. Out of those that find value in Tiktok, usage is fairly promising but nothing spectacular — Tik Tok is far from the levels of Facebook or Instagram, where daily usage has already become a habit for a majority of its users.
Will it survive?
Despite all its triumphs and challenges, TikTok is already facing nothing short of a full-on assault from would-be copycat apps. Facebook has already launched it’s own copycat app, Lasso, where its main strategy is to aggressively push it in countries that Tik Tok is not big in. In November 2019 Instagram launched its own copy, Reels, which is a feature within Instagram story based on 15 second videos set to music. It also comes with a Top Reels explore section, just like TikTok’s For You page. Whilst Facebook has had a history of producing clones that never gained traction, like Poke and Slingshot, Instagram, however, has had success devouring its competitors through integration of features from other platforms. Instagram has strategically launched Reels first in Brazil under the moniker “Cenas”, and one vital feature to note is how Reels is able to integrate “lifelog” features seemlessly into its user experience, by allowing the ephemeral 24-hour only story-based Reels to be added to the profiles’ non-disappearing Highlights. Given Instagram’s popularity and depth of user base in Western countries, Reels is a non-trivial threat. In an age where Instagram users are already posting videos they create on TikTok on Instagram, it is not difficult to foresee how the middleman can be cut from very quickly from this process.
A Final Word
There are many things that Tik Tok needs to do to ensure that it is not the internet’s new toy. First, it has to focus on retaining users, if not MAU will hit a limit and start dropping. It has to look closely at the question of “value” — which is a qualitative question — and must be willing to innovate and experiment with its recommendation system to capture the most value across most sub-segments without alienating core users. It should also find ways to improve its content ecosystem to make room for more diversified experiences beyond its original target audience, especially in the West. Lastly, it has to pay close attention to what its competitors are doing and out-maneuver them in terms of user/content strategy, as well as product.
On the positive side, it’s important to remember that in 2011, Instagram started off and for a long time considered itself primarily as a photography app, before going fully mainstream. TikTok could very well follow a similar path, if it plays its cards right.
