TikTok's Secret Weapon 🤖
A Pandemic Fairytale: TikTok 🧚♀️
For TikTok, the Pandemic has been a massive tailwind:
They’re the first app not owned by Facebook to reach 3 Billion App Installs (Note: this includes TikTok + Douyin, the Chinese Version of the App) 📈
User Growth sky rocketed at the advent of the Pandemic, as people countered the isolation of lockdowns by going on TikTok 🤳
Biden revoked Trump orders to ban them, and their parent company reported 2020 revenue of $34.3 Billion (with a valuation of $425 Billion)💰
The Creator Drought 🌵
Content creators around the world are focusing their energy on TikTok, and other platforms are trying to lure them back with their cheque books:
YouTube will pay $100 million to creators.
Snapchat is paying $1 million a day to creators.
Facebook will pay $1 billion to creators through 2022.
If social media platforms don’t have fresh content to serve users, their platforms get stale… but is this approach sustainable?
TikTok’s Secret Weapon 🤖
How it works:
The first thing you see when you open TikTok is the “For You” page.
It’s a window into their powerful algorithm, that’s designed to shower you in an endless stream of videos tailored to you.
Each video uploaded to TikTok is exposed to a test group of users and given a Performance Score based on how people respond to it (i.e. video completion rates, view times, shares). The better the score, the more people TikTok shows that video to.
Here’s why it’s brilliant:
As a platform, TikTok needs users to spend the maximum amount of time on the app… so they aligned their goals with that of the Content Creators.
As a Creator, the algorithm helps you “go viral” if you make videos that people watch to completion (irrespective of your number of followers).
TLDR = TikTok is rewarding you to keep the audience on the app.
Manufacturing Virality 🧃
Free will might be an illusion created by our brains... is “Going Viral” an illusion too?
If algorithm decides on who gets to see what content and whether it floats to the top vs. sinks to the bottom of their newsfeed, who’s really in charge here?
A beneficiary of this was Nathan Apodaca (aka DoggFace208), a potato farmer from Idaho. One fine day his car broke down on the way to work, so he hopped on his skateboard and started vibing to Fleetwood Mac while sipping on Cranberry Juice.
The correct signals fired and TikTok’s AI decided he was the chosen one, so it pushed the snowball down the hill (i.e. showing it to more users who would like it, who in turn shared it with the friends who likely have similar tastes). This snowball got pretty huge, as of today his original post has 81M+ Views and has inspired 614K re-makes on TikTok (and he even managed to make $30K in profit in just 5 days selling merch).
🔮 TikTok sells it’s Algorithm, and becomes better…
Social Media has traditionally been a walled garden, it’s hard to imagine Facebook sharing their algorithm with anyone… but that’s exactly what ByteDance is doing:
Through BytePlus, they’re letting companies access their recommendation algorithm, and they’ll help you tailor it to your business. For example, a travel app in Singapore saw a 40% increase in conversions using BytePlus.
What’s genius about this decision to sell their secret sauce is that it creates a flywheel: More Companies using the Algo = More Data = Better TikTok.
Only time will tell if Zuck can surf fast enough to catch ByteDance…
