A Deep Dive Into TikTok
Trends, Attention Spans, and a Blast From the Past. What Hasn’t TikTok Done?
Have you ever been scrolling through TikTok and one day you see a dance trending, but the next day it’s gone? Or heard a trendy dance song and remembered that movie from five years ago that you loved and rewatched because of TikTok? TikTok has completely changed the social media world in many different ways. Care to find out how?
Trend or Dead?
Trends on TikTok sometimes die overnight. Not only on TikTok but also other social media platforms, like Twitter.
On Twitter, there is the #Explore page to see the trending hashtags in your area, cumulated to what you like. Twitter’s explore page is also there to catch you up on what is happening now.
TikTok has a similar feature called the ForYou Page, which generates videos curated to what you have engaged in on the app. But have you ever had the experience of noticing a trend die out and be replaced with a new one? This leads many people to ask why things become “unpopular?”
According to Lisa Zyga, a study was done about the different trends — how fast they rise and fall. “The quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies,” found Zyga. Most TikTok trends go in 90-day cycles, according to Chavie Lieber. Lieber also states that trends on TikTok have a six-month life span at best.
Michael Stelzner of the Social Media Examiner asserts that “TikTok has publicly stated that your content has a shelf life of 90 days. You can have videos on the For You page (the main feed on TikTok) that are months old and still get comments, engagement, and followers from them.” Stelzner means that if you post a video on TikTok, you have a 90-day period where interactions will still happen with the help of the ForYou Page. After those 90 days, that video will no longer receive engagement unless a user is specifically looking for that video.
Looking back into trends dying, we see trends having a 6-month life span. For example, the trend of a remixed song from ABBA making a comeback and being used for all types of videos took over the ForYou Page in June of 2022.
Looking back at this trend that once dominated TikTok, it has slowly died out over the past six months. The trend peaked in June; now, the sound only occasionally pops up on the ForYou Page. I would not be shocked if the sound was never used again after December of 2022. But why do trends die out?
Trends die out when there is something new that can replace it. We saw the ABBA trend be replaced with hundreds of other “trendy” things for July.
In a 2020 article for The Advocate about TikTok’s usage of film and music content, Kaeli Kampschmidt points out that “[TikTok’s] algorithm is constantly searching for new clips and creators rather than promoting the same content over and over, making it so that a new song is popular each week and new content is being pumped out around the clock.” Trends, however, are only one example of something slowly dying overnight.
Attention Spans are Dying Too!
When Alex Zhu, co-CEO of Musical.ly, “cracked the code” on finding the perfect time for a short video that would not bore the viewer and keep one’s attention, this affected almost every social media platform.
We see the effects of this project in other ways, like affecting our ability to control our focus on main points, lessons, and conversations. Chris Anderson, TED Talks curator, explains that “[Eighteen minutes is] short enough to hold people’s attention, including on the internet, and precise enough to be taken seriously. But it’s also long enough to say something that matters.” Even educational businesses that are targeted towards helping people learn new information and present a topic are shortening their video lengths due to the short attention span that is arguably caused by social media and smartphone usage.
Suad Al-Furaih and Hamed M. Al-Awidi, in their article about FoMO (Fear of Missing Out) and disengagement in lectures, state that “[i]n most traditional classroom settings, attention tends to decline after about 10 to 15 min.” Since smartphones and technology are so readily available to students, their focus tends to be lost faster to technology than the lecture itself.
In Kaitlin Kramer’s TED Talk about attention spans, she mentions a study done by Microsoft and how they claim a human’s attention span is less than a goldfish’s. Kramer also notes that our attention spans have dropped from twelve seconds in the early 2000s to now eight seconds.
Most early versions of social media apps came to fame in the early 2000s. Is social media to blame for shortening attention spans? Researchers say yes.
Blast From the Past
Maybe you’ve had the experience of scrolling through TikTok and hearing a sound — or song — from your old favorite movie that you forgot about.
TikTok does influence the various movie and music industries. TikTok does not only affect industries from the different sounds being used on TikTok but through promoting videos of specific movies and songs.
Earlier, I mentioned the ABBA song was a trending remix on TikTok for June and into July. Many people used that sound, specifically for the use of showing their beautiful vacations to Greece and other countries. This ABBA sound brought back watching the once famous movie Mamma Mia.
Another notably famous sound on TikTok was a snip of Regina George from the movie Mean Girls.
After this sound was used, many TikTok users remembered their once favorite film and decided to rewatch it.
As an example of this phenomenon, Kampschmidt explains how “[t]he Netflix movie entitled Love, released in 2015, made it into Netflix’s top 10 list this July because TikTok users began a challenge of watching it and recording their reactions to the first scene.” Kampschmidt later discusses that if an advertisement can go viral on TikTok, there is no better way to gain the most sales or views than using TikTok.
But why does TikTok have the ability to be the best website to sell your idea/product on? According to Embed Social, in 2023 “[TikTok sales are] reaching out to a massive young audience and shocking engagement rates.”
Many of the products marketed on TikTok and other social media platforms are usually projected to target people ages 10–30. This is because in December 2022 “80% [of TikTok users] are between the ages 16–34.”
“66% of TikTok users agree TikTok has helped them decide what to buy,” states Embed Social. This percentage shows that with the use of TikTok advertisements, the rate of a user finding something interesting to buy is higher than one might imagine.
Influencing the World
TikTok has had so many influences on the world around us, and many more changes will come. We see these changes from how long trends are “trendy,” how the app shortens attention spans, and how TikTok has helped old movies and songs regain popularity.
What else will TikTok be able to reshape in the future? Only time will tell.
Additional Sources Used in This Article
Suad Al-Furaih, A. A., and Hamed M. Al-Awidi. “Fear of missing out (FoMO) among undergraduate students in relation to attention distraction and learning disengagement in lectures.” Education and Information Technologies. 2021. Found on Gale Academic OneFile.
