Odds are if you’re reading a blog on a computer right now, you might have little familiarity with TikTok, the very unique social platform that is basically a combination of Musical.ly and Vine. Posts consist of short videos, cut with music or an audio clip, and the meat of TikTok is virality. Every few days or week there is a new popular song to use, post to spoof, or challenge to accept. Sometimes old songs get revisited, as evidenced by the “Mr. Sandman” craze recently.
The first thing that distinguishes TikTok from most other platforms, is that the “homepage” defaults to a “For You” section, filled with videos the TikTok algorithm has decided you would like, and what is trending. This is quite a departure from your usual feed, filled with folks you’ve chosen to follow, and a few “targeted ads”.
Last Call decided that the quirkiness of TikTok would be a great fit for our creative department to experiment with. We browse the app looking for sounds that would lend themselves to a new animated vision. We also try to use posts from currently trending hashtags, or popular users. The beauty of TikTok, is that the more absurd the post or remix, the better they seem to perform. This is why TikTok has lent itself so well to being a fun creative exercise. Below are a few examples of the work we’ve been doing.
So far we have only posted 6 times, and we are looking for patterns, but there doesn’t seem to be a firm best time or day to post. Our hypothesis is that the hashtags, and content will determine a post’s success. Our first few posts had little engagement, the next few did consecutively better, and the fifth post blew up, getting over 5000 views, 700 likes and gained us around 60 followers. The following post got less than 50 views, when posted around the same time. We think this may be that the content was too literal, and animated too quickly for the joke to land. After the high of getting so many views on the last post, this was really humbling and presented an excellent opportunity to revisit our goals for TikTok.
Though TikTok may not be an essential platform for all brands, for LCM it provides an exciting skill development opportunity, and a fun way to show off what we can do. You can follow us on TikTok here!
