A Horizontal Comparison of Social Media: What Exactly is TikTok
With 46 million US downloads in 2019 and 680 million monthly active users worldwide, TikTok has become the latest popular social media platform. With the rise of TikTok, its competition with other social media giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat is getting more fierce. Do we really grasp what kind of product is TikTok? Many see TikTok as just an alternative version of the existing social media platforms but in fact the subtleties in its product design and mission makes a huge difference.
Before diving in TikTok itself, let’s compare major social media platforms in terms of product design traits. Such practice provides clarity in what each of the products is and how they are similar and different.
Social Connection
Social media platforms are for either strong ties or weak ties, where strong ties are family, friends, and colleagues, and weak ties are acquaintances and strangers. How a social media product started and the product design determines whether the product is for strong ties or weak ties. Facebook started as an online network for college students and naturally people would only connect with their friends or people they knew in real life. The two-way followership design reinforced such practice of connecting with only strong ties. Instagram started as an image sharing app where people post pictures about themselves and their life, which set the tone of primarily strong ties — most people only want to share their life with close friends. This can be also manifested in the feature “Close Friends” list that allows users to post stories to close friends only. Snapchat rapidly gained its popularity with the disappearing messages and ephemeral Stories. The ephemeral features are supposed for things that are casual, fun, and goofy. Again, no one does that with strangers except for content creators or influencers. Snapchat even has a friends ranking system based on how frequently two friends send message and stories to each other. To conclude, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are for people connecting with their strong ties and knowing what their friends are up to.
Youtube was first created as an online platform for anyone to post any video content they desired. The idea was about sharing video to a broader spectrum of audience. It has a strict one-way followership design where a user can only subscribe to a channel but a channel cannot follow a user. Vine is critical in the discussion of TikTok since they are quite similar. It was created for users to post casual or funny moments in their life in 6 seconds. 6 seconds is a very short time to tell a story and turned out many took it as a creative challenge. Vine grew rapidly and became the hub for 6-second comedy， which was meant for sharing with a larger group of audience. Youtube and Vine are for weak ties and wide-range content distribution.
Content
Besides strength of connections, content type and style also define the product. Given that Facebook is built for strong ties, content is more about personal updates and announcements. Instagram is born with originality, creativity, and aesthetics. People take pictures of themselves and their life with good filters. The community has established an atmosphere that is about beautiful things and curation. With that tradition and the large user base, many influencers use Instagram to promote their content and expand the Instagram community . This blends well with Instagram’s culture because it aligns with the pursuit of beauty and delicateness. However, the core of Instagram is still about close friends and strong ties. On the contrary to Instagram, Snapchat’s ephemeral features are for things that are fun, casual, goofy, and even embarrassing (I call it “things you don’t want your grandma to know”). The innovative and interesting filters and stickers provide room for creativity in expression. Later, many influencers, celebrities, and media set up their public accounts on Snapchat. But just like Instagram, Snapchat’s core is still about close friends.
Unfortunately during Vine’s time, I was still in high school and I did not have first hand experience with it. But I watched some Vine videos on Youtube to get a sense of the app. The videos were indeed very funny and carefully designed to tell a good story. Youtube, on the other hand, serves as the ultimate place for long and curated videos of any kind. According to Think with Google’s survey in 2016, the top four content categories watched by YouTube users are comedy, music, entertainment/pop culture, and “how to.”
So What is TikTok?
TikTok is a short-video (15 seconds) sharing platform. The platform aspires to be “leading destination for short-form mobile video and our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy”. The content style is fun, casual, creative but also “premeditated and storyboarded”. Although emphasizing on creativity, the videos are created based upon remixing existing sources. Tik Tok has music and recorded snippets of dialogues from a variety of sources that users can use to create videos. Several biggest trends on TikTok are dances with music, voice-over comedy, memes, and lip-syncing.
TikTok’s content distribution system is also one of its kind. In Connie Chan’s blog post “When AI is the Product: The Rise of AI-Based Consumer Apps”, TikTok is purely driven by AI and uses have no control over the content displayed to them — the AI algorithms decide which videos to show users. The recommendation does not provide a list of video but instead a stream of them and infers users’ preference by interaction data rather than asking users explicitly whether they want to see a video or not. This makes a huge difference in content consumption and production. We will go into it very soon in this article.
TikTok has also slowly formed its cultural wave. There are many TikTok compilation videos and commentary videos about TikTok on Youtube. Charli D’Amelio, one of the biggest TikTokers and with 44 million fans, is featured on a SuperBowl commercial and appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” to show the audience her famous dance moves. The song “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X even became viral after Lil Nas X made it into a meme on Tik Tok. Video creators used the song as a soundtrack to create dance videos with the hashtag #yeehaw, which have been seen more than 67 million times.
How is TikTok Similar and Different?
Social media is a somewhat misleading word because many social media platforms are in fact built upon social networks. They are not media. This is especially true for strong-ties-based platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. The content is created to enhance the network and the interaction experience. An example from a weak tie social media would be Reddit, where people join virtual interest groups and talk about topics of their interest. Youtube and Vine are about media and entertainment. They are about creating and distributing content that people enjoy. The content is created to be shared with and consumed by a large group of audience.
From this logic, we can see that TikTok is a true social media for weak ties. It is about content creation, distribution, and consumption, just like Youtube and Vine. But also, how does TikTok differentiate itself? Because of the short-video form and the AI-based algorithm, many misunderstands TikTok as an alternate version of the existing social media giants. Even Mark Zuckerberg thinks TikTok’s For You tab is just like Instagram’s Explore tab. Instagram is about social network but TikTok is about media and entertainment. As TechCrunch acutely points out the difference, TikTok is “not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It’s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else and acting out jokes … And it’s not about originality — the heart of Instagram.”
Also Instagram’s Explore tab is distinctively different than TikTok’s For You tab. Although they use similar data to generate video recommendations, the way content is displayed makes a big difference. From the screenshot comparison above, we can see that Instagram recommends a board of videos where users can choose whichever video they want to see. And if one clicks into it, one can explicitly click the button “Not Interested” to inform the algorithm. TikTok’s recommends a stream of videos where a user cannot control what to see. The only a user can do with a video he/she doesn’t like is to swipe up or down to get to another video. TikTok’s recommendation algorithm infers users preference from interaction such as how much the user spends on a video. This mechanism provides very little room for mistakes and hence TikTok will prefer to recommend videos that are proven to be successful and popular. Niche videos are less likely to be seen or featured and the video recall period is longer, meaning that popular videos stay longer in the pool rather than new videos being recommended sooner. It also lowers the diversity of content because only popular categories or content form are more likely to be recommended. Creators have little motivation to try new things. The design of TikTok shows that it is a short-video media for massive audience and the core evolves around highly calculated content that appeals to most people.
What Can TikTok Learn from Its Successful and Failed Peers?
Instagram, Youtube and Vine are great teachers for TikTok. Instagram and Youtube have been successful in monetization and building a community. Vine failed because of lack of monetization and content creators left for other platforms (especially Youtube) as a result. One of the biggest challenges TikTok currently faces is monetization. Eventually, if the TikTokers cannot make money from producing videos, they stop doing so and audience leave.
In the next article, I will walk through the monetization model of Instagram, and Youtube, and how Vine failed. This can shed light on how TikTok can find its way to monetization. Please stay tuned. :)
Sources:
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/tiktok
https://amp.businessinsider.com/what-snapchat-friend-emoji-mean-how-to-change-2017-1
https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-stars-are-finding-new-ways-to-monetize-their-videos-2019-12
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/data/top-content-categories-youtube/
https://a16z.com/2018/12/03/when-ai-is-the-product-the-rise-of-ai-based-consumer-apps/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/laurenstrapagiel/tiktok-lil-nas-x-old-town-road
https://time.com/5561466/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-billboard/
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/01/instagram-vs-tiktok/
https://theweek.com/articles/856051/how-tiktok-captured-generation
