Having a TikTok Account May Be a New Business Essential
As TikTok trends continue to influence consumer decisions, its potential as a business tool is being realized.
If you went to the grocery store sometime around February of this year looking for feta cheese, only to come up short, TikTok was to blame.
At the time, a simple pasta recipe calling for a block of Feta, cherry tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil to be baked and then mixed with noodles had taken over the app. People flocked to their local supermarkets so they could try it for themselves and maybe even add their own short video to the hashtag “FetaPasta,” which, currently, has collected 1.1 billion views. Some found, however, that the viral recipe was so popular that the stores near them had sold out of the dish’s main ingredient entirely.
It’s a telling example. Over the past few years, TikTok videos and trends have proven to be a guiding force for purchasing patterns and culture at large, especially among younger generations. Whether it be selling out ingredients to viral pasta recipes, popularizing luxury fashion brands among a new generation, or bringing old hit songs back into the spotlight, one video on TikTok seems to have the ability to influence the actions of thousands, if not millions of people. It’s no surprise then that this app, which draws in around 100 million users a month in the United States alone, has the potential to be a powerful marketing tool. For individual creators and businesses alike, posting a short video on TikTok means the chance to reach a large audience that can, at times, extend across the globe.
In early May of 2021, Victoria Paris, a TikTok creator with over one million followers, posted a video featuring the colorful, brightly patterned skirts sold at a small outdoor shop in New York City. The business’s owners, Nawang Samdup and his wife Tsering Youdon, have set up their shop, Choeying Garments, on the corner of Thompson and Houston Street in Manhattan four days a week since they opened in 2006. Over 15 years of experience hardly prepared them for what happened when, unbeknownst to them, their store went viral on TikTok.
“Hours after she had put this up on TikTok, a lot of young girls came and all of them said ‘we came because of Victoria, because of TikTok,’” says Samdup. Later that same day, his entire store had sold out. “When this video happened, we were not prepared for this, you know, and suddenly when 50 or 100 girls came, I ran out of stock,” recalls Samdup. “Twice I ran out of stock. If I had an abundance of stock, I could have done even better.”
Since then, the couple has seen people come from all over the world to buy their products. “We had girls who came from the Middle East and South America and they also saw those TikToks,” Samdup added.
The fact that posts on social media can reach a wide audience and even transform a business entirely is not a new revelation. Brands have partnered with internet influencers and celebrities to advertise their products on social media sites like Instagram and YouTube for years for this exact reason. But there seems to be a unique quality about TikTok. Unlike the other outlets, ordinary people can post a video on the app and have it reach millions of viewers without already having an established audience.
This is why, when people walk into Whipped Urban Dessert Lab on Manhattan’s Lower East Side asking to make a video about the shop’s oat milk soft-serve ice cream, the employees are happy to oblige. “They usually just come in and record us and ask us questions and film us making [the ice cream],” explains Mariana Agostini, who works at the shop. “We show them everything like how we make it and give them, I guess, a more personalized experience. Even though we greet every customer just how we do them, they want some more information sometimes so we just help them out with that.”
For viewers, these immersive, tailor-made videos, keep them drawn in. Jadah Sanders, a college student who says she spends several hours each day scrolling through the app, explains that this format is often more compelling to her than a still picture that might be more standard on other social media platforms. “I think it’s a lot more creative,” she says. “Like with all the text or the jump cuts, or you can even put comedy into it, and it’s a little video rather than just a picture of food and text.”
As with Choeying Garments, creative videos like these, posted by customers, are what first caused Whipped Urban Dessert Lab to go viral. “We saw that there were lines out the door and we were confused,” Agostini recalls. “And then I think someone had sent the video and they were like ‘oh my god you blew up.’”
The shop had already had good business and a relatively successful Instagram account, but when they found out that the long lines were a result of TikTok, they decided to make an account of their own. “This place was known, like people did come here,” explains Agostini. “But after TikTok, there were just lines out the door every day, every night, even in the cold because we went viral in January or February, of 2021.” And, though the store’s TikTok account has just under seven thousand followers–compared to their Instagram’s more than 48,000–certain videos on their page have been able to amass over a million views and thousands of likes.
Jenny Le, a student at New York University, explains that it is the number of views, likes, and comments– the latter two being easily visible on the right-hand side of each video– that makes her so compelled to try something she sees on TikTok. “I think [TikTok] does impact me a lot because you see all of these people trying something and for me, especially the food trends like the feta pasta or whatever else it is, I always try to recreate it and see if I like it because all of these people like it,” she says. If a video manages to do well and land on a large number of viewers’ individual For You pages, “then a lot of people are able to see how cool this business is, and sometimes in the comments people are hyping it up, so you know that it’s good,” says Le.
As viewers heed the advice of their fellow TikTok-users in massive numbers, a consumer base has emerged that is sure to target the latest trends. Business owners who have experienced the effects of TikTok virality first-hand are coming to realize that there may be more to the app than trendy dances and relatable humor. “Initially, I thought TikTok was just for young people to watch games and things like that, but it means serious business also,” says Samdup. “TikTok means serious business.”
