Why has Tik Tok become a great tool for promoting products?

Why is Tik Tok so magical in promoting products? What kind of characteristics does he possess? Why can't you stop watching TikTok?

01

Suddenly, a lot of people rushed to Chongqing during the holidays.

I am from Chongqing. In my memory, Chongqing has always been quite lukewarm. When I was still in the tourism circle, the key words that foreign tourists mentioned about Chongqing were basically: the hot pot is delicious and the summer is hot.

Now this impression has been updated to: Chongqing? The one that is very popular on Tik Tok.

In Douyin, one of the most popular short video apps at the moment, 5 out of 10 homepage recommendations are about Chongqing.

The Hongyadong tourist attraction received 142,000 visitors during the May Day holiday, which was more than five times the established reception capacity. Chongqing became popular and the locals were "panicked". My circle of friends during those days was like this:

When Chongqing started to become popular on Douyin, I hadn’t downloaded Douyin yet. When I saw the news about "Chongqing frequently browsing Douyin" on the web, and when my colleagues from Xinjiang said that their family would go to Hongyadong to check in on May Day, I had an illusion that the scenic spots I had seen since I was a child had really grown up to be different from my impression of them?

In order to verify whether it is true as rumored that a large number of people went to Chongqing to check in, I made a special trip to various popular tourist attractions.

02

After 6 hours of exposure to the sun, walking from Liziba to Kuixing Tower, from Jiefangbei to Ciqikou, no matter whether the attractions have become more beautiful or there are rumors that many people have checked in on Douyin, the answer is no.

At the crowded Hongyadong, what I saw was that most people were standing in the square, looking up with their phones held high, trying to find a camera angle with fewer phones to record the dreamlike scene of "Spirited Away" in Hongyadong. There were no Tik Tok images on those screens.

I didn't meet anyone shooting Douyin live, but I did meet a few people doing live broadcasts on Douyu . After an awkward chat, a dancer from another place who was live broadcasting the zombie dance in the square told me that there was no special reason for him to live broadcast in Hongyadong. He was wandering around various places and going wherever there were many people. He said this was called a "tour."

By chance, I also met a few locals who were crazy about taking photos. The reason why they chose to go to the crowded Hongyadong at night was the same as mine - "Hongyadong has become popular on the Internet, let's see how popular it is."

Facts have proved that people who come to Chongqing do not necessarily come to check in on Douyin. Those who blatantly talk about checking in in Chongqing only exist on Douyin. Someone told me at the scene that there weren’t that many people checking in on Douyin, so why do people say that Douyin has become popular in Chongqing?

After checking in at Hongyadong, I downloaded TikTok. That day was April 27th, and this time has special meaning to me.

On the stage of the second half of the Internet , "Tik Tok" is a rising presence. This product was only launched in September 2016. Douyou (Tik Tok users) joked that they "watch 300 Tik Tok messages a day". Tik Tok officially announced that "monthly active users are in the hundreds of millions". Weibo cracked down on Tik Tok, Tencent clarified the matter, and a large number of variety show brands were exposed. It even defeated WeChat and Weibo and ranked at the top of the APP application store list.

In 2017, the Chinese Internet and young people were addicted to something - TikTok. From the time I downloaded TikTok until now, I have been using it for an average of 2 hours a day, and have watched more than 7,200 videos in total. This number is still growing.

What's even more frightening is that along with the year-on-year increase in this figure, my Alipay expenditure has also increased. To sum up, because I was attracted by Douyin, I have purchased the same items as Douyin, such as enchanting flowers, oversized enter keys, and foot soaking shoes, with a cumulative consumption of more than 200.

Before April 27, I was still a Qingming child who went to bed on time at 12 o'clock and worked diligently. How many people are like me, who stayed up late, slacked off and scrolled through their phones for hours because of a 15-second video of a stranger, and even made a purchase without any product recommendation or explanation.

I suddenly understood that, in fact, the scenery in Chongqing is still the same scenery, the people are still the same people, and the food is still the same food, but time flies and people are easily left behind, and the cherries turn red and the banana leaves turn green.

Careful planning is no longer necessary for long journeys, and careful calculation is no longer a necessity for making decisions. All your behaviors can be changed because of a 15-second video of a stranger. I call this - Douyin planting grass.

03

Even though they have been poisoned, we still need to figure out why they have been poisoned. Why has it been the TikTok short video? Why can’t Kuaishou plant grass? Why doesn’t Kuaishou have the same product as Kuaishou?

To clarify this issue, we must first understand the essence. Whether it is Douyin or Kuaishou, Weishi or Weibo Stories, we have become more and more accepting of short videos - short videos are the fastest and most accurate way for us to obtain information .

Graphics, text, and video are our main ways of disseminating information. Text is a carrier of language, and it needs to go through a subjective "translation" process before it can be accurately received by the brain.

Compared with text, the information conveyed by pictures is relatively clear. In kindergarten textbooks, most of the questions are about distinguishing circles and squares. The children watch cartoons, and our human instinct makes us more sensitive to visual stimulation.

Therefore, processing video information is much easier for humans than processing text and picture information. Short video tools such as Tik Tok have enabled us to transition from the era of pictures and texts to the era of reading videos.

04

The above is what everyone has felt, but with so many short video platforms, it must be because Douyin short videos have been blessed with certain technical means and platform atmosphere, which has led to the phenomenon of "Douyin planting grass".

"No one can beat me in BGM", this is a joke, but it summarizes a very important element of Tik Tok content expression - background music. On the Liziba platform, I posted my first Tik Tok video. There were a few sparse people on the empty platform. The camera moved slowly, and the light rail began to pass through the building, accompanied by Faye Wong's "I'm Waiting for You at the End". I had an illusion that I was in the regretful and beautiful movie "Passing by Your World".

In addition to BGM, the Douyin team also put a lot of effort into the operation of video shooting technology, such as: beauty and filters, and cooperation with Toutiao AI Laboratory. New technologies such as face recognition, body recognition and 3D rendering based on deep learning and image recognition are implanted into creative ideas such as panoramic stickers, dance machines, AR stickers, 3D hair dyeing, etc.

These technologies can easily create a sense of "beauty" in an ordinary 15-second scene, separating you from the ordinary and stale daily life, allowing ordinary people to turn their ordinary lives into a movie, escaping from reality.

"You are the next internet celebrity", Douyin can easily give users such an impression, especially because of the unexpected focus of Douyin users. It is also because Douyin has used its strength to tell users that the threshold is really low - download an APP + register an account + shoot a video = an internet celebrity with millions of likes.

Taking Chongqing's sudden popularity as an example, Douyin did not have any cooperation with the Chongqing Tourism Bureau, did not carry out a marketing campaign like it did for Xi'an, and it has never even launched a challenge in the name of Chongqing. It just relied on recommendations to gain popularity.

It should be emphasized that Douyin’s popular recommendation mechanism is different from that of WeChat official accounts . It requires popular guidance based on your original fans and original comments. On Tik Tok, even if you are a new account with 0 followers and 0 views, you will still be on the recommendation page, ranked below or above a video with millions of likes.

Chongqing is not an isolated case. There are many people who became popular on Douyin without any marketing from Douyin. This phenomenon gives users a signal: marketing is not the main thing in Douyin. The public has sharp eyes. As long as the acting skills are good, you will become popular early.

This signal is an attraction for any Douyin user, even if you don’t want to become an Internet celebrity.

Douyin says this is called "recording a beautiful life", but perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it "finding ways to free yourself from the pressure of mediocrity". But this is not a criticism, just listen to me.

05

A few days ago, there was a news report that a few young people, in order to get likes on TikTok, raised funds and spent a huge amount of money to charter a plane, planning to fly over the city of Chongqing to shoot a video of "eating hot pot in the sky". On May 6, a couple climbed onto the roof of a train in order to shoot a video for TikTok, and the boy was electrocuted to death.

In this world, no creature craves attention and expression more than humans.

In the past, the right to express oneself was in the hands of the upper class. Before writing The Communist Manifesto, Marx was expelled from the French government and wandered to England to join Engels and others.

Even if we are not as smart as Engels and cannot write poetry, as ordinary people, we still have the desire to express ourselves. No matter who you are or what kind of situation you are in, the inexpressible feeling of loneliness will always follow you, reminding us of the importance of living in peace with it as a human being.

Li Zhi sings in the song: "We are born alone."

The main force of Tik Tok is people born in the 1990s and even the 2000s. This youngest generation in China grew up under the influence of the Internet and are naturally more receptive to using the Internet to gain attention and express themselves.

The personalized product ideas and low entry barriers of Douyin mentioned above are important factors in attracting and retaining people who desire personalized expression.

06

Once you have a desire, there is still one step to satisfy it, and that is the condition.

Take the example of Chongqing's popularity: Chongqing Tourism Development and Reform Commission announced that among the tourists who came to Chongqing during the May Day holiday, Sichuan, Guangdong, Guizhou, Hubei and Zhejiang ranked the top five. How convenient it is to get to Chongqing from these cities!

In September 2017, the Chongqing-Guizhou Railway was completed and opened to traffic, shortening the travel time from Chongqing to Guiyang from more than 8 hours to about 2 hours;

After the opening of the Chongqing-Guizhou Railway, it will be seamlessly connected with the already completed and opened Guiyang-Guangzhou High-speed Railway, shortening the travel time from Chongqing to Guangzhou from 11 hours to 5 hours.

The Chengdu-Chongqing high-speed railway Jingkou to Shapingba section has been completed and opened to traffic. It only takes one hour to travel from Chongqing to Chengdu by high-speed railway.

In the past, transportation was slow and letters were long. When two friends made an appointment, whether they would meet or not depended entirely on fate. When they parted, they said they would meet at the Cliff of Broken Heart in ten years, so they would be ready to set off in the seventh or eighth year.

It’s different now. In the documentary “My Great Country”, the strength of China’s bridges and speed has aroused a sense of honor for the motherland among the whole nation. Our pace of life is constantly accelerating due to technology and development.

Looking back at other things that Douyin has made popular, whether it is Haidilao or various types of tea, these things themselves are in daily life scenes, and the cost for Douyin users to follow the trend and verify their popularity is very low, and it is convenient to quickly meet their needs.

The most common copywriting on Douyin is: "I heard that it is easy to get likes by shooting this", "Others got tens of thousands of little hearts by shooting this, so I want to try it too."

07

Based on the above, after personal experiments, I feel that the sense of identity brought by Douyin has made many people become Douyin friends.

Most of Douyin's users have experienced QQ, Weibo, and WeChat. In these software, everyone speaks their own words. They seem to follow each other, but in fact they have blocked each other. Each has its own boundaries and its own vigilance.

Sometimes I post something on WeChat Moments late at night, but when I think about it the next day I’m afraid that others will think I’m being pretentious or stupid, so I delete it immediately. Most people who have experienced this have become the people who post in public accounts asking “Why don’t you post on WeChat Moments anymore?”

But it’s different on TikTok. Because of a video, 1 billion users can instantly become one over a cup of tea.

In the video, you said that your boyfriend cheated on you and your Douyin friends denounced the scumbag; in the video, your 70-year-old grandfather danced the Gray Dance with you and your Douyin friends liked the family reunion; in the video, you shared your feelings after a serious illness and made jokes about life, and your Douyin friends encouraged you to be brave in life.

And even if there are no likes, thanks to the recommendation mechanism that is not restricted by the original fans, the increased views will be satisfying, making you feel that your liveliness and loneliness, your day and night on Douyin, are embraced by someone.

This feeling cannot be given by WeChat, Weibo, and QQ. Tik Tok is all-inclusive. You have a mood of expressing yourself regardless of whether the world finds it abrupt or not. On Tik Tok, you can feel a tacit understanding among fellow Tik Tok users. Douyin users are the same kind.

08

It can be said that Tik Tok is the most suitable way of expression for most young people of this era, and its powerful grass-planting function has brought changes to the market.

The same product as Douyin that is popular on Taobao is the answer tea that Douyin has landed on. From a product perspective, traffic and activity have already enabled Douyin to possess the functional attributes for product research and development, product promotion , and product maintenance.

So far, most of the Douyin recommendations still occur in the catering and strategy scenarios. These two types of information have low copying costs and are prone to follow-up phenomena.

The corporate communication strategy of “two microblogs and one Douyin” has been spread, but has not been tested on a large scale. How far Douyin will go in the future can only be described by a sentence in “Dream of Red Mansions”:

The white earth looks so clean.

What a lot of room for imagination.

The author of this article @尔er compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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