By Lei Caldejon
TikTok is a newer social-media app gaining popularity with users in addition to marketers.
This app allows people to express creativity through short-form mobile videos. Top trending videos on TikTok’s website on March 18 includes: “Me on My Way to Annoy my Mom Because I am Bored” at 28.5 million views, ThatPineAppleGirl cutting her hair with 51.6 million and CallenSchaub doing artwork at 34.2 million views.
College of Southern Nevada student Catherine Cabanatan says, “I like TikTok because every video is never longer than a minute and so I can watch videos for hours and there’s always something new to watch. There’s always new content and it comes really fast too with some really cool, funny or interesting things to watch. I like to use it while I get ready to sleep at night or just in passing periods. It’s part of my daily social media line up now.”
According to Statista, a leading market research company, in its “TikTok user ratio in the U.S. 2020, by age group” published Feb. 11, “As of January 2020, users in their teens accounted for 37.2% of TikTok’s active user accounts in the United States…users aged 20 to 29 years were the second-largest user group, accounting for 26.3% of the video sharing app’s user base on the Android platform.”
Generation Z, those born after 1997, is an increasingly intense market for brands to find on TikTok.
Jeremiah Lopez, a CSN student and avid user of TikTok, says, “Marketers should be taking advantage of TikTok. Even I’ve experienced being pulled into someone’s business and feeling obligated to buy things because they kept showing me their products in a really fun and creative way. At first you think it’s just a fun video but then that fun video becomes a promotional one and then boom, suddenly a 60-second clip has millions of likes and hundreds to thousands of people are trying to get their hands on some random thing especially with artists trying to get commission for their art. I think it’s a great way to really get your product out to a younger audience too.”
CSN Streamin’ Radio’s Social Media Director Ana Meza says, “(TikTok) connects a business to the consumer in a personal way. That’s the best way to market and to get directly to consumers versus TV, or things like that, just because not everybody watches TV anymore.”
Lopez says, “It’s just a different kind of app and there’s so many different ways to be creative on it so you can’t really lose attention from it because there’s always a fun and new trend going on in the app or a video from it goes viral on Twitter or Instagram so I think it’ll be popular for a long time to come.”
Coyote Student News at the College of Southern Nevada 