Social media revolution — TikTok
Why Tik-Tok is the number one social media application in the new world
Tik-Tok is a social media platform which is not well understood by many people who are born before the millennials and before 1995. Even the generation of millennials doesn’t seem to capture the meaning of tik-tok for its original intentions. We think that the application is used by a very small number of people when compared with social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The actual numbers say a different story. Currently, Tik-Tok has over 1.5 billion users registered to the application and has more than 800 million active users. India has over 57% of the application user base with over 323 million downloads and more than 49% of them being teenagers. Tik-Tok has grabbed different cultures, ethnicities, social statuses and living standards and bought them all into one single platform. The company behind Tik-Tok is focusing on using AI for the success of the application. This makes Tik-Tok a different animal in the sea of social media.
Who is behind Tik-Tok?
Tik-Tok is a short-form video sharing application. Many people I see in Tik-Tok mistakenly use the application for lip singing or in music performances. The content can be any type based on the user’s imagination and creativity. Tik-Tok was originated in China by a company called bite dance 2012. The company has a net worth of 75 Billion USD making it the most valuable startup in the world. The founder Zhang Yiming, a former Microsoft engineer and Chinese serial entrepreneur, had the goal of running a boundless company. Bitedance is like the Chinese version of Facebook. They created an AI-powered news aggregator and then a chat application before looking into a video app. The first video application they designed was called douyn. It gained over one million users in a short amount of time. In 2015 they launched Tik-Tok into the market. By that time they had a direct competitor called musical.ly. It was doing very well with millions of users producing short video content for musical.ly. Tik-Tok bought musical.ly for 1 Billion USD merging their user bases into one single platform. After that Tik-Tok started to move fast in the industry by buying out other companies to uplift the marketing aspect of the product.
How they do it?
Tik-Tok is using a powerful AI tool that is extreme than any other social media platform in existence. The feed is a critical fact when coming to customer retention in social media. In tik-tok, the feed captures your likings and add similar types of videos to not only to keep you in the feed but also increases your curiosity plus the likeness towards the application. You have no power over controlling what you like to watch, but why people love this application so much. It is done through AI of the application. The application interface is a full-screen video and you can swipe to see different videos. If you watch a few videos you can see that the app is providing you more of the same content. If you skip a few videos then the AI will limit the video types which you skipped. This is an aggressive methodology by the AI of the application. In other applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram the AI used merely as a tool. But in Tik-Tok the AI keeps the ultimate control over what the user sees. Normally in product user experience, the user control is critically important for delightful user experience. Even though the AI has taken a very aggressive approach to control the user’s control over what they see in the application, it has been a huge success.
Tik-tok has faced its demons in the past due to its capabilities and how people are using the application. Tik-tok has created its own culture with it and it has created both sociological and psychological impact on its users.
Sociological impact
- Users spending money, energy and money for a small gain and retention of an audience with lesser ROI
- Social isolation — The original intention of this application is to socialize with people. People get involved with their virtual fan base a lot more than the real people making the distance from reality and life.
- promoting nudity or sexuality — This is a common problem with tik-tok. To keep the fan base and attract more people social profile many young girls offer their bodies with a dance or any other means to be viewed by the others. Sensual dancing is common among young teenage girls to increase the number of views as well as to keep a high fan base.
- Mode of harassment — The application users, who mostly are the young generation use this application to showcase their skills and thoughts. People who see the actions done by these kids, teenagers, young or old may find them funny or find them a mode of harassment due to their presentation. The application has created a platform for virtual bullying on people who have a less thought process, skills and abilities. This has been increased over the years and with a platform which has less control over who sees what, people tend to suffer from others who negatively criticise what they do.
- Promote violence, weapons and drugs — Users who have different backgrounds, motives and intentions come to these types of social platforms to showcase what they are offering. Since the young generation is the majority of the application users its really easy to be manipulated on using drugs, weapons or violence to look “COOL” in the platform. This effect has created many problems in society and needs to be addressed soon.
Psychological Impact
- The biggest problem in social platforms is that the users are being narcissistic over their appearance in the social media platform. This is not a problem just belong to Tik-Tok but all platforms. It’s common in the new society that people become highly self-obsessed with their social status. The attitudes of these people can cause trouble for the whole society. You may know friend’s of yours who just want to make videos about them while they perform crazy actions. You can notice them when you can see their actions. Most of the time their actions are all about them and they think that other people should stay below them.
TikTok is not all a bad application. It is the application user’s thoughts and beliefs that took the application to the status which is now. I believe that it is a very good application which has a huge potential in creating a platform for content creators. Its how we use this platform will define the future of TikTok
