At the moment, TikTok is the fastest growing social network. With over 800 million monthly active users and over 1.5 billion downloads from the app stores, TikTok is taking big steps toward the top of the most popular social networks. The figure showing the number of active users is the seventh-largest looking at all social media platforms in the world, from the below graphic courtesy of Betway. Out of 1.5 billion downloads from the app stores, nearly half of them occurred last year (740 million).
However, many of us aren’t familiar with this social network and don’t know exactly what TikTok can bring to our lives.
TikTok Is Available in More Than 150 Countries
Although TikTok began to gain its popularity in China, where it was created as Douyin in September 2016, tremendous growth happened only when it crossed the Chinese border. In 2018 and 2019, TikTok’s strong expansion into the United States as well as Europe began. TikTok is now available in more than 150 countries, enabling it to grow and develop further. Also, TikTok is available in 75 different languages making it easy for people to use its features themselves.
TikTok is still a huge unknown in Europe and we can say that 2019 marked the beginning of an expansion into this market, while 2020 will surely bring even more growth and equal expansion to almost all areas of Europe. Due to the fact that the number of users in Europe can still grow significantly, users who now create content on TikTok have a great opportunity to quickly advance and gather large numbers of followers. So, if you want a lot of followers, now is the right time to join TikTok.
Localized Content as a Formula for Success
Although the social networks at the very core of functioning don’t differ too much one from another, nevertheless there are some differences between them. TikTok is a lot like Instagram and Snapchat because it comes down to scrolling through various users’ visual content. The peculiarity of TikTok is that you can get a lot of views on the videos you have posted without having many followers. So, your video can go viral overnight, which will delight many.
The TikTok algorithm also lets users explore new content while tracking the posts of the people they follow. So, the algorithm investigates what kind of content you’re interested in and, on that basis, offers you videos that you might find interesting. In doing so, it’s mostly driven by the logic that the content it offers is localized, that is, created by people in your environment. In addition, users have at their disposal various challenges and competitions at the local level, thus building an active local community within the globally popular application. It’s a very interesting approach that has proven to be great for TikTok user activity so far.
Video Content Without Unnecessary Embellishment
Instagram has brought an interesting trend among social networks – people try to portray their everyday life much better than it really is. So, one gets the impression that half of the content on Instagram is artificially created, that is, everything is too pretty. Even though some people like it because they enjoy great photos and videos, there’s also another group of people to whom such content is unnatural and therefore useless.
Unlike Instagram, TikTok turned in a different direction. On it, users share all those less beautiful moments in their lives without too much embellishment. So, on TikTok, a person can be exactly who it really is in real life and show itself in its natural self. The beauty of TikTok lies in the fact that creativity can be expressed by adding attractive effects that take video to a whole new level but don’t enhance the reality of the user. If you want to be honest with your fans, TikTok is a great choice.
Users Spent Nearly an Hour a Day on TikTok
Research has shown that TikTok users open the app 8 times on average each day. Not counting time to sleep this means that the average TikTok user takes a look at the app every second hour. But more significant is the fact that the average user spends more than 50 minutes each day in the TikTok application.
All of this data regarding TikTok app usage time is even more interesting considering the fact that TikTok videos are shorter than a minute. That’s actually the maximum allowed length of each video, so the assumption is that most videos are only about half a minute or less. It means that the average user can view more than 100 video clips or more than 100 different users within the 50 minutes he or she spends on TikTok. Therefore, it’s not a surprise that a single video on TikTok easily goes viral regardless of the number of followers of the person who created it.
