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Can TikTok beat Meta with these 3 strategies

In 2023 it is hard to find someone who does not know TikTok. Today we are going to discuss how an app born only in 2017 started dominating the app business market of the entire world. How are decades-old businesses forced to revamp their strategies?

Let us talk about numbers first.


Downloads have increased from 126 Mn 

 in 2017 to 3500 Mn  in 2022

Growth by a multiple of 27 in 5 years

 

 

 

MAU (Monthly active users) is an important matrix

 to measure the engagement level of the app 

increased from 133 Mn in 2018 to 1466 Mn

 a growth of 11 times

 

 

 

Not only the downloads and user engagement

 matrices are increasing but the revenue earned 

also increased from 150 bn$ in 2018 to 9410 bn $

 in 2022. Growth by a multiple of 62…. wahoo

                 



         It is an exceptional success story in the era of social giants like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. So much so that Tik Tok become the most downloaded app of 2021 and 2022 in a row beating Facebook by a good margin.

Before I dwell into the strategy implemented by TikTok let me make it clear to all that it is not a social media app

I am not saying this Mr. Blake chandlee, president of global business byte-dance is saying this. To quote his exact words “We are an entertainment platform,” Chandler said. “The difference is significant. It’s a massive difference.”

What is Social media and how TikTok is different?

Social media is the place where we share with our friends. We tap on like to tell our friend circle who we are and what we care about. We post something to tell our political views, our humor (cats!), and our favorite artists. We create and join various communities and groups around everything from our college friends to trekking in the Himalayas and IPL team. We try to be social on social media sites, The objective is to bring elements of our personal lives our likes/dislikes, and opinions into the feeds and timelines of others.

This is not what happens on TikTok. On TikTok, they don’t want this type of social interaction. They don’t want to engage in communal activity. It's visible in their product choices.

  • No friends
  • No friend suggestion
  • No efforts to build a community
  • Who liked which content is not visible anywhere
  • To like the content, you just need to tap on the content itself

Their focus is only on content and if the user is interested in content or not

On TikTok users watch short videos (films). many of the user is there for dead entertainment and with slite sign of boredom they swipe up for next. TikTok is not a social channel. It is a broadcast channel.

This will be further established once I explain their strategy.

There are many reasons and many articles explaining the marketing and customer acquisition strategies of TikTok. They are there and helped it to become what it is today in this article I would look at reasons from a product angle. Here are three main reasons behind its success.

1: Algo-friendly design

The design of TikTok is very algorithm friendly and much different from other so-called social media platforms like FB. If you have used TikTok it shows one content at a time and to watch the next content user needs to swipe up/down. It is quite different from other social media sites where a single user is shown 2-3 contents on one screen.

With this paginated display of content, TikTok is getting a clear and accurate measure of users liking and disliking which was not possible in existing social media sites. with this design TikTok can 

 

A: Reliably find out when a user disliked any content.

If the user explicitly swiped up/down any piece of content to watch the next content. It is a very strong and reliable signal that the user has not liked that content. In contrast, other social media sites don’t have any concrete way of finding user dislike. At most, they can find that user has not reacted to content, which is not an accurate measure of users' dislikes. Years back Facebook tried to have a dislike button but since it is a social platform and users are generally polite in social media it was quite inappropriate to unlike someone's posts (photo/post etc), so they removed it.

 

B: Reliably measure if the user has liked any piece of content.

In TikTok, no one knows who liked whose content, so the viewer is not under any social obligation to like any content because it was shared by a friend/colleague/boss. If a user has liked a piece of content some part of it appealed user as there is no other social incentive to like. Even if the user does not explicitly like the content but watched it fully or/2-3 times, gives quite an accurate measure of the user's liking.

 

2: Focus on the interest graph rather than the social graph

All traditional social media work on social graphs, they would serve more content from your friends, assuming that since the user has a social connection with them, they may also like the content produced by their friends. Or they serve more content that you explicitly liked but in social platforms like may not mean you liked the content you may hit the like just not to be impolite.

TikTok on other hand is focusing only on the interest graphs, their algo is focused only on gauging user interest in any content and serving them more of that content.

“In short when you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you “They know your interests better than your girlfriend 😊. That is one of the reasons that TikTok is doing great in very diverse cultural geographies USA, India, Korea, and China.

 

3: Fast and simple onboarding

Onboarding to TikTok is simple and easy, it does not ask users to choose various interests, persons, or topics, once you log in to your land on the "For You" feed, where all magic happens.

The algorithm very quickly learns from how users interact with the content they’re served in the app’s ‘For You’ feed to decide what it should deliver to them next.TikTok's algo is closer to Netflix/Spotify than any social media and that's why they call themself entertainment apps, not social media apps, more on this later.

With this deadly cocktail of easy onboarding, interest-based recommendation and algo-friendly design TikTok can do what giants could not and create a serious dent in the revenue of Meta.

 

By now you might be thinking why Meta or others can’t make these algorithms and use these strategies to beat TikTok. They can and they are trying. You have observed a lot of changes in Instagram nowadays. But in AI, the effectiveness of algos depends on learning, and learning depends on the size of a data set. TikTok being an early adopter of this interest-based algorithm, they have the advantage of having the biggest data set. So even if others develop these product strategies their Algorithms would be behind TikTok in a learning curve and that’s a huge advantage Tik Tok has. 

 

to make mistakes is human, to rise from mistakes is superhuman 

 Follow me for more such product/ business case studies.

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