Our content post assignment this week asks if a brand should jump on a new social media platform or wait until it’s been proven successful.
I would argue that the only reason for any brand, business, or organization (all rereferred to as an organization, henceforward) to move to any social media platform is if there is a relevant audience on that platform that they should be communicating with.
Key to any social media platform is the audience demographics that have formed around it. That is the first metric that must be examined before making the decision to invest in building a presence or promoting on said platform.
For example, a recent headline from CNBC read: TikTok passes Instagram as second-most popular social app for U.S. teens
That’s amazing, Instagram has been around for several years, it is owned by Facebook — and yet, overnight here came TikTok and zoomed past Instagram with that key demographic.
But how much should that matter to an organization? This article on Forbes makes a compelling argument that it depends on the nature of your business and who your key audience might be.
Is your most important audience US teenagers? If so, then yes — it matters greatly, and you ought to start making plans to expanding out onto TikTok to be where your key audience is largest.
I would imagine that a brand like Nike that specializes in shoe sales to teenage consumers would want to be on TikTok.
But would it matter to the World Bank or International Monetary Fund? I think the likely answer is no, it would not.
These multilateral lending institutions might feel it would be more useful to pour social media resources into strengthening a presence on a platform like LinkedIn, where they may connect with fellow global thought leaders and top tier talent in their respective sectors.
That having been said, it might be prudent for organizations to park themselves on that new social media real estate even if they do not plan to commit to a presence on this new and growing platform.
This makes sure that the official social media handle or ident is not hijacked and held hostage by someone else or another organization.
Indeed, in the early days of the internet cybersquatting, registering, selling or using a domain name with the intent of profiting from the goodwill of someone else’s trademark, was a real problem.
In summary, before moving to a new platform look at your business and then look at your most important audience. If they look to be moving to that new platform, I would argue it would be prudent to start investing in that platform to keep up with your audience.
If not, then I would argue organizations ought to continue to invest in those platforms that remain home to their most important audiences.
Lastly, for this content post assignment, we have to pick one new social platform that became popular in the past year and describe if we think it will or will not stick around.
For this assignment, I am choosing TikTok. This social platform, known in China as Douyin, is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance.
The social media platform is used to make a variety of short-form videos, from genres like dance, comedy, and education, that have a duration from 3 to 60 seconds.
It is not going anywhere.
Why? Because it has something that Facebook cannot seize upon and integrate into their own offer.
And that is the endless tide of recommendations presented to the user as they navigate the platform.
Watch one video and immediately get recommended several more that are likely to be relevant to your interests or what you first searched for on the platform. It is addictive.
The second reason is momentum.
When it comes to the population of a new social media app, just as with a social media influencer — there comes a tipping point, and when that tipping point is crossed you are looking at exponential growth as the crowd follows the rest of the crowd onto the new platform.
Instagram may on the surface look like something of an answer to TikTok, with the Reels feature — for example, but where it falls short is in the eye of the beholder. Instagram is a curated influencer space that offers up beautiful lands, full of impossibly beautiful people.
TikTok is nothing like that. TikTok is a no holds barred bloc party, it is authentic — as one CNET author pointed out. The people are imperfect, the gags are grown worthy, the dancing clumsy — and in that way it makes it fall more welcoming to view and participate in.
It is for all these reasons that TikTok is very much here to stay and may indeed belong to the forever young, in mind, body, and spirit.
