TikTok: UWGB Comm Dept.
- dohrari
- Mar 5, 2020
- 2 min read
By: Ariana Dohr, Emily Gerlikovski and Ashley Perket
Trendy new app that gets you to tap
In case you missed it, TikTok is a big deal. With more than 800 million active users, the app has grown tremendously over the past year.
The meaning of the words “Tick Tock” have changed over time, from referencing the sound of a clock, to the infamous Kesha song, to now getting a different spelling and meaning with the app TikTok. TikTok launched in 2017, with the majority of content being lip-syncing or dancing videos.
Today, the content has greatly evolved. People can still post lip-syncing or dance videos, but users also are sharing stunt videos, prank videos, day-in-the-life videos and animal videos. There are very few limits of what creators can make, but it must stay within 60 seconds for one video. Or, users can go live on their account for as long as they wish.
TikTok, like any social media platform, has an algorithm that determines the popularity and success rate of a video and a video content creator. The algorithm takes the posted video and drops it into the ForYouPage of a small selected pool of views. If those viewers react positively, then the video moves up to a bigger pool of ForYouPage views and it keeps going. This is how videos become popular on TikTok. Videos can also be liked on the app and shared in a variety of
ways, including through other social media or text.
TikTok didn’t begin with such a popular start. At first, while popular with its original users, the TikTok app was considered a niche platform. For example, celebrities would have never considered this platform as a way to reach their fans… however, now celebrities are popping up all over the ForYouPages, much to the original content creators’ dismay. The content creators whose main focus is TikTok are feeling irritated about the surge of celebrities coming over to join this app. The original content creators feel that celebrities should stay in their own lane, meaning they should stick to Instagram and other mainstream celebrity rich platforms, rather than trying their luck on TikTok.
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