The popularity of Chinese-owned video-sharing service TikTok (抖音) continues to grow among young people in the United States. In 2019, experts say the service more than doubled its American user base to 37 million. TikTok is especially popular with teens and young adults.
The service lets users create and share their short videos that they think interesting and useful, and many of them are under 15 seconds. The TikTok app offers a wide choice of sounds, brief parts of songs and special effects tools to help create a video. Some TikTok-based memes are very popular. Videos often include popular songs from well-known artists and TikTok has even helped launch the careers of new music stars.
TikTok is considered a competitor to the video-sharing app Snapchat, as well as Facebook's Instagram service. Snapchat and Instagram also mainly interest young users with a wide mix of photos and videos centered largely on fashion, pop culture and humor.
Last year, TikTok was the second-most downloaded app from Apple and Google stores. Only WhatsApp was downloaded more. Research company Sensor Tower guesses people have downloaded the TikTok app 1.65 billion times.
TikTok has been used by many major companies to reach young people who use little or no traditional media. One of those companies is American-based e. l. f. Cosmetics. The makeup company's chief marketer, Kory Marchisotto, said that TikTok is "where the Gen Z party is". Gen Z is a name used to call the generation born between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. "That's where they're all hanging out," Marchisotto said.
Companies appearing on TikTok can make money through advertising. Often, the companies create user "challenges" as part of their ad campaigns. In challenges, users are invited to publish their own videos in which they perform similar dance moves. One campaign by e. l. f. Cosmetics, for example, asked people to wink and move their lips while following a song. TikTok users created 3 million videos that received more than 4 billion view.
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