With over 500 million users, TikTok has become a world-famous app to children and adults all over the world. From humor to dancing videos, TikTok has any video that anyone could think to search for. The $75 billion app, according to the club reporter, was created by Zhang Yiming in 2018, and has made over 12 billion from Tiktok.
According to teen vogue.com, TikTok was previously Musical.ly, where people would upload lip-synch videos. In 2018, a Chinese tech company, ByteDance, acquired musical.ly emerged it with its own lip-synching app, known as Douyin. The result was TikTok.
In 2016, Chinese app developer ByteDance created an app named Douyin, a rival to Musical.ly. Launched initially only in China, the app was renamed and rebranded to TikTok for better international appeal. Within a year, the TikTok app had more than 100 million users.
With this unified brand and user base, the app began to increase in popularity very quickly. TikTok became the most downloaded app on the Apple App store in early 2018, surpassing Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube. As of July 2019, TikTok had over 500million total installs on the Google Play Store.
TikTok primarily shows video content that is 15 seconds in length. While there is an option to share videos up to one minute long, there is no longer-form video, and no image or text sharing options. These restrictions make the app harder to comprehend the first few times you use it.
As of 2019, TikTok has been downloaded over 1 billion times. As the platform is growing, it is evolving and capturing the interest of both brands and celebrities.
The biggest draw of TikTok is the ability to post about anything. Humor, hobbies, fitness, travel, music, photography, dance; every category is open and gaining huge attention. Each area is offering exposure for those that can adapt their content to the short-form video model.
The evolution of mobile marketing on platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat has shown that anything is possible with the right audience.
While entertainment seems to be the main draw at the moment, there is an increase in both educational, aspirational, and business-oriented content.
TikTok allows each account to share their Instagram and Youtube links in their profile, which makes it easier to gain crossover followers.
The main goal of brands on TikTok is engagement and attracting a new audience. While legacy brands do this well, it is not clear whether smaller companies can draw the same following on the platform.