To TikTok or not to TikTok? Is this the 2 billion download question facing your company?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name's Jim James, and this is the podcast for all entrepreneurs and business owners out there who know they've got some value in their businesses if they can just figure out the best ways to communicate that. And on this podcast, we're going to talk about the power of TikTok and whether to TikTok or not to TikTok. TikTok, for those of us that have got kids and even that don't, know that It's become a global phenomenon in the last couple of years, so much so that it's been downloaded over 2 billion times, and the average TikTok user spends 45 minutes on the app. Although I have to say, with my children, it's well over that. So should we use it as business owners? And if so, how are we going to leverage the power of TikTok for our own businesses, for public relations and advertising? That's what we're going to address today. Now, back in 2016-17, my daughters loved to make videos to a program called Music— Musical.ly. And this was an app that was developed in China. We were living in Beijing at the time. But this Musical.ly caught on because kids could take short videos, set them to music, and share them with their friends. And this app obviously became super popular and was rebranded TikTok in 2018 when it was bought by ByteDance. And of course, now it has gone global. The mission statement, as explained on the website of TikTok, is to capture and present the world's creativity, knowledge, and moments that matter in everyday life. Now, the reason that TikTok is a subject of a public relations Podcast is because we're seeing it everywhere now. It's the new cool. I went to Starbucks with my daughters yesterday, and a young lad must have been eleven years old was wearing a sweatshirt with TikTok logo on it. In the same way that people used to wear an Adidas or a Nike sweatshirt, TikTok has become the new cool. It's also become something that whenever I turn around, my daughters are showing me. But it's not just now for small enterprises and for young people. As we're going to discover, TikTok has become an extremely powerful marketing franchise. So I decided to check out the business side because I'm always interested in whether I should promote East West PR on there and whether I should recommend TikTok to my clients. Now, if you go to business.tiktok.com, you can get an account. It's free. And when you log in to their website, you get to see 11 modules, including introduction to TikTok, how to create ads, the ad structuring, the format, the reporting, the creative optimization, how to do split testing, and even the creative best practices. It allows you to have 3 different types of people running the account. So this very neatly packaged, uh, sort of owner manual along with control panel, like a Google Ads Word Center, is giving you everything that you need to start in the business of buying ads on TikTok. Now, it seems to me to some degree that it's superseding Instagram and Pinterest, especially for the younger audience. But what it's really doing on another level is it is building communities by encouraging users to share their passion and their creative expression through their videos. Now, when we were in the older days of public relations, trying to get people to express what they were doing and to share those pictures, we'd call them a case study. And we would often interview people that were using something or say had bought a car to get a testimonial, for example, or tried a restaurant. We get them to say something nice and put it in the front. Now, now everybody is making videos and sharing them in real time without the client actually being involved in that at all. So it's real people making real content, and it's Promising the opportunity to turn a culture into a cult-like following. And according to my 11-year-old, there are now different sections in different communities inside TikTok. It's not just one big pool, much like Facebook or any of these other channels. It's becoming segmented as people are starting to create mini mini-groups, mini-cultures. So there are people involved in creating sport-related or food-related or any other kind of topics, DIY, a bit like YouTube has done. So when you're looking at creating, for example, an advertising campaign, you can actually start to choose which audience groups And this is the element that I thought was most interesting. It enables you to create what they call a lookalike audience. So you can create an audience, what they call a custom audience, which is where you define the demographic, for example, and the geography. It's now over 150 countries and 75 languages, so it really is a global platform. But then once you've created your custom audience You could then create a lookalike audience, which are people that, if you like, overlap with your current audience. Now we often talk about sort of building out audiences through these networks and concentric circles where they may share, for example, an age group but a different geography, or an interest in one thing, for example, maybe owning pets but also in fashion. So this ability to find lookalike audiences seems a really interesting iteration. Now I thought, well, how much is this being used in real terms by businesses? And when we look at the website, it's showing us the, the kind of case studies that they've got. Now they've shown on their website Where, for example, KFC Germany has been using it to reach millennials. And in the UK and Europe, KFC has been using TikTok to promote the fact that they're restarting their takeaways again and home deliveries. The Silver Swan brand in the Philippines has been using it for their cosmetics brands. The VinFast e-scooters in Vietnam Have been using TikTok as well. Iberdrola has been using it for the World Environment Day. Now this is a continental European telco that's using TikTok to talk about something very serious in the World Environment Day, and they're doing that by using hashtags. Nike, L'Oréal, and Rexona. So sports brands, cosmetics brands, personal hygiene brands are also using TikTok, and they're using it with a combination of both advertising but also, let's call it, user-generated content. And I'll talk about that in just a moment. But there's a perception that TikTok is for the young, But it's interesting because it doesn't seem to be that way, or some people are aiming ahead of the curve. So Kia in Korea is the car company, obviously, and they're promoting their Kia models on TikTok. Mercedes in Europe have been promoting their cars on TikTok. Now, the perception that TikTok is just for Gen Zs then seems to be untrue. And we're seeing more and more businesses starting to think about this 15 to 30 second video as being a way of making very, very interesting and frankly very low-cost commercials. Amazon Prime, StudioCanal in Germany, the StudioCanal, which is the The French broadcaster is launching its new German content on TikTok. There's some interesting international mixes going on here. Now, there were some 219 million installs in Q4 of 2019, but in Q1 of 2020, there were 315 million downloads of TikTok. So these people being enticed with new captivating content. Interestingly enough, the US is the leading market for TikTok. Interesting in that, of course, it has its own domestic players like YouTube, well, it has Snapchat, and of course has Facebook, but people are turning away from those and using TikTok instead. Some $50 million was spent on TikTok alone in America in February. So, you know, that puts you at what some— and that's just America alone, so that's over a billion dollars a year probably worldwide in revenue. Isn't it? As a business, pretty amazing considering this this company was only bought in 2018 from the Musical.ly people in Shanghai. So the the demographic is 63% of TikTok users are between the age of 10 and 29. So actually, 29 is starting to get up. But if you then Think about that, then some 37%, over a third, are in their 30s and even 40s, which are young early adopters. Females on TikTok outnumber males nearly 2 to 1 in America and worldwide, so it's been seen perhaps as a, a female-friendly platform where people are sharing And I know that most of these brands we've talked about, for example, like L'Oréal and Rexona, are cosmetics brands because they lend themselves to the selfie and the short video. But Mercedes, Kia, Amazon Prime, these are not gender-specific brands. VinFast is not a gender-specific brand, the scooters in Vietnam. So how can we use TikTok for public relations if we're not interested in buying ads? Well, one of the key ways seems to be the use of influencers and getting influencers to create a TikTok video and sharing that with a hashtag. Now, influencers we've talked about before are really just people who have a following already. In the past, an influencer would be an editor and they would be publishing under a well-known brand, but now influencers are using channels like Facebook or Twitter to create their own followings. So the, the publishing platform now is a generic one, and people who have got good things to say are becoming the influencers. So you can hire an influencer. Some have got up to 10 million followers, And if they create a video and they publish that and put hashtags, then those hashtags can create a link to a real website. And this is where the big brands are, are going with TikTok. What they're doing is they're creating hashtags and links to their mobile commerce platforms and web pages. The majority of people on TikTok are using Android, not the Apple iOS, but then these campaigns are leading to stores for either, for example, on Etsy or main brand stores or on eBay or Amazon, for example, like Amazon Prime. So it's possible then to have content created by influencers advertising as well, in the same way that one might advertise on, for example, WeChat or on Weibo or on Twitter. People are now buying ads on TikTok and getting people to come just as interstitials, just in the same way they would between programming on television. So we're getting a blend then between people who are creating content already, people buying hashtags, people buying adverts. And of course, the other is where we're seeing public relations companies creating challenges for users and inspiring people to generate content and repost it. This is happening, for example, when we're seeing people challenging people to do, to do cooking, for example, and to post the video for people to show what they're wearing and to post it and see how many likes they get. So actually, the game on TikTok is the same game as YouTube, the same game as Facebook, Pinterest. It's all down to eyeballs. It's down to who has the greatest following and how can we reach out to them. Just what's different is that the format is different. It's short-form video set to music, and the audience is a little bit younger, a little bit more dynamic, but it's 100% mobile. So if that's the audience that you're selling to, if that's who you want to attract either to buy or to partner or to become staff employees, then TikTok seems to be worth a, a second chance, a second look. And if you're interested to go and see what's sort of money you need to spend, then go to business.tiktok.com. So I started this because TikTok is plainly a presence now with 2 billion downloads that no one can afford to ignore. The question is, is it a platform that we need to take seriously or not? And that'll really come down to who we're selling to and what we're selling those people. So with that, I'd like to say thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode of Speak PR. This is the program for business owners who are looking for ways to unlock the value in their business by using tools like TikTok and some of the 8,000 marketing technology platforms that are available to us, most of which you can use for free. My name is Jim James. Until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, A profitable business and that you keep on posting on social media. Thank you so much.