Ever wake up one morning at 12:45am after picking up your spouse from the train station and realize you have yet to go to sleep that day?
If not, let me assure you… the joys of finally seeing your better half is virtually guaranteed to keep you up at least 15 more minutes after returning home… giving you enough time to think to yourself:
“Jeepers self, if only I could grab myself a nice tasty snack before finally succumbing to the blissful concept of sleep!”
If so, allow me to direct you to that most magnificent of candies…
The TicTac.
It’s small.
It’s delightful.
It’s tasty.
AND…. it’s only a few letters away from TikTok, which gives me a brilliant to segue to the topic of this post… the Care and Feeding of New Platforms as They Mature!
Otherwise known, of course, as a platform that USED to be talked about because of the quick video content that teens and tweens and other creatures of the night love and adore sharing.
Love and adore sharing, I might add, to the point that Tiktok is quickly becoming one of the fastest growing platforms out there!
digiday.com/media/heres-publishers-like-buzzfeed-hearst-vice-learning-tiktok/
has a nifty rundown on how brands are now using Tiktok as well, including Buzzfeed and its post about …
Tasty.
Tasty is a baking hack.
And one of the reasons for this particularly odd combo of ideas?
To wit:
“One of our motivating factors to be on TikTok and create a Tasty account was that we were finding a lot of copycat Tasty accounts on TikTok,” Tabir Akhter, head of platform strategy at BuzzFeed said.
“People want to see food content on TikTok.
It’s not only videos from high school bathrooms. It’s more than that. It’s a huge and robust platform of lots of people with lots of different interests, and people are really responding to our huge viral food videos on Tasty…”
In case that unexpected statement passed you by with the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, allow me to highlight it once more for you:
“People want to see food content on TikTok. ”
‘Coulda fooled me indeed!
But I suppose that’s what happens as platforms grow and mature.
Other interesting comments include:
“…The short-form nature of TikTok videos, however, makes it relatively cost-effective to produce new content as Vice intends to do, but it also forces creators to get creative, even when they’re adapting existing content.
“What makes TikTok unique is the hyper-speed at which content is created and consumed,” said Akhter. “We do enjoy the really short-form nature of the videos … it forces your creativity in the adaptation process.”
Shah, however, said he wonders if TikTok will eventually allow longer-form video content like Musical.ly did before, since he finds the 15-second video format somewhat limiting….”
Notice that Musical.ly thrown in there?
Did you know that Musical.ly was sold to the Chinese news firm Bytedance, reportedly for as much as $1 billion?
And Bytedance owns Tiktok?
Which means that Tiktok is a Chinese company?
And already has had accusations of the opposite of transparency leveled against it?
But I digress.
Anywhos, the remainder of the article reminds us that the field of social media is continuously changing (and that non-US companies are now building some of the most popular social media platforms out there. This growth, btw, has NOT been ignored by Google as you can see via this article:
Reminds me of Facebook trying and failing to buy Snapchat).
And lookie there, I digressed yet one more time.
The whole platform of profiting from Tiktok could be the subject of a great 1 2 3 cheatsheet as well! You could break it down like so:
Step 1.) Optimize your TikTok account
Step 2.) Start generating viral content
Step 3.) Move your audience from Tiktok to your own list/properties
Resources for the above might be:
falakdigital.com/how-to-get-famous-on-tiktok/
yrcharisma.com/2019/09/23/how-to-go-viral-on-tiktok/
fanbytes.co.uk/how-you-can-go-viral-on-tiktok/
Your takeaway?
Sure, you can go bananas on TikTok. Remember though of this neat concept called “privacy” and check out delightful articles like:
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/02/opinion/will-china-export-its-illiberal-innovation.html
futurism.com/ftc-tiktok-record-fine-spying-pre-teens
(here’s an eyebrow-raising snippet from the above:
“The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) said, in a Jan. 11 article written by visiting fellow and cybersecurity expert Claudia Biancotti, that user data from Chinese social-media apps could pose serious security problems, as they can be “easily accessed and leveraged” by Beijing.
Biancotti warned that user data generated through the app can inadvertently help Beijing use the information to perfect its surveillance software to better recognize “Western faces.”
China has a mass surveillance system, called Skynet, in place, with millions of artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced security cameras positioned in public spaces around the country. The Chinese regime aims to complete 100 percent coverage by 2020.”
So yep.
Your takeaway?
Be reeeeaaaalllly sure you want to risk giving away even more of your non-existent privacy before delving into the world above.
And then ask Alexa to shut the door after you leave.
Enjoy!
Get Started Here
You’ll love what you learn… Promise!