1. Don’t get left behind
Let FOMO drive you to TikTok land. It’s new, fresh and not owned by Facebook. At the time of writing, The Washington Post, Guardian Australia, USA Today, ESPN, Buzzfeed, Vice, Wired, and The Mirror, to name but a few, are officially TikTok’ing.
What could go wrong?
Actually, TikTok has been around since late 2017, but it’s only now that the big cheeses are starting to get in on the action. It’s so new, there’s a google sheets doc with a list of the accounts to follow.
Even the right-leaning newspaper The Telegraph has joined in on the fun. While TikTok and The Telegraph might not seem like obvious bedfellows, their content has proved to be just as entertaining as their younger counterparts.
2. See the people behind the masks
Something about TikTok and its dancing and singing culture is drawing out the people behind the masks. A good example is CNN’s Max Foster, who is doing nothing by halves on TikTok, proving himself to be a master of the lip-sync.
Each of his TikTok posts is a micro-musical meditation on newsworthy topics of the day (and the occasional not newsworthy topics). You get to see the behind-the-scenes moments of a reporter’s life.
Dave Jorgenson over at the Washington Post is something of a TikTok journalistic pioneer, pointing the camera inwards at the people who work at the newspaper; the humans behind the news. German TV news show Tagesschau has gone hard on this platform too. Both publications provide content that is a mix of news, views, and explainers.
And if sport’s your thing, TikTok now houses all the top football teams, from Liverpool FC to Lionel Messi’s Barcelona.
The England rugby team are active, as well as individual sports stars such as Olympic diver Tom Daley, plus a whole heap of athletes you might never have heard of – dragging you all out of your sports filter bubbles.
Parkour is well represented on TikTok, too, replete with some very sensible warnings at the beginning of the videos. Red Bull, as you’d imagine, have uploaded their world to this app and I’m discovering extreme sports I never knew existed before.
3. Seamless video sharing
Sharing a video from TikTok on a group chat, especially WhatsApp, is painless.
Unlike sharing a tweet, the video sits perfectly on the chat, as if you’ve uploaded a video from your own phone, and the WhatsApp users are not guided to join TikTok (or even know that they are watching a TikTok video). Clean.
4. Great UX
TikTok is seriously easy to use. I struggled (and continue to struggle) with SnapChat. I have no idea how to find anything on Snap and as a consequence I rarely ever use it. TikTok is designed as if they had me in the user testing process, to the point that it’s hard to go wrong. It’s so easy to use. Officially idiot-proof.
In a brief session, I was able to make short videos with soundtracks and all kinds of visual effects. Everything is clear and easy. The user experience is swift and enjoyable, from beginning to end. It’s impressive how much you can make in a short space of time, then send it off into TikTok land for people to smile (or frown) at. It’s easy.
5. (Almost) No ads
Nowadays, Instagram seems to have turned into an all-out advertising assault, with the occasional Insta post interspersed amongst the items for sale. With TikTok, on the other hand, you may sometimes get a Lewis Capaldi advert, but you can skip it immediately rather than wait the obligatory five seconds like on other platforms.
Other than that, I’ve not noticed any other ads in my time on TikTok, although it’s surely just a matter of time. So make the most of it and use TikTok to enjoy the videos you’d be watching on Instagram, but on TikTok.
6. Simple feed
TikTok are currently adhering to the KISS principle. Keep it simple, stupid. At the time of writing, there are two video feeds when you open up your TikTok app: the ‘For You’ feed and the ‘Following’ feed. By default you land on the ‘For You’ feed, giving you things outside your little bubble, although what you are being given here is also something you’re more likely to enjoy watching, anyway. So the algorithm is still keeping you in your bubble to some degree.
..and a few reasons not to TikTok…
1. Censorship
TikTok has come under fire for allegedly censoring posts, especially any that are to do with China or Islam. They have been accused of helping the Chinese government disseminate propaganda about Xinjiang. Indeed, TikTok was suspiciously devoid of any content relating to the Hong Kong protests. Subjects such as Tiananmen Square, Falun Gong, or Taiwan’s independence are also subject to censorship.
New Jersey TikTok star Feroza Aziz claims she was briefly locked out of her account for posting political content highlighting the plight of Uighur Muslims in China. TikTok admitted she had been locked out, but claimed the confusion was actually over a satirical post Aziz had shared about Muslim dating, which happened to contain an image of Osama bin Laden. At best, this is a poor filtering system which cannot distinguish between satire and genuine endorsement of an image.
Aziz’s most famous post begins as a video about eyelashes, but suddenly changes to a plea for the plight of Uighurs in China. “This is another holocaust,” says Aziz, “yet no-one is talking about.”
Aziz is still on TikTok, with a different account name (@ferozaaziz), and her ‘controversial’ posts about Uighurs can still be viewed.
2. Security risk
The US government is reportedly investigating TikTok, fearing that the app is a national security risk. Given the current mood against all things Chinese (think Huawei and 5G), it’s easy to dismiss this as Trump-driven paranoia, but it is a fact that companies in China must share their data with the government. In the US, Apple made headlines for not doing this back in 2016.
3. TikTok stars are already fading
Some of the biggest hitters in TikTok are seeing their audiences wane. Ajay Barman, an Indian TikTok star, believes he has been shadow-banned for posting content on Hindu-Muslim brotherhood. His posts previously received around 200,000 views, a number that has now sank to around 8,000 a post. With such heavy-handed (or under-handed) tactics, TikTok could indeed alienate its user base, particularly politically-minded users.
It seems TikTok’s honeymoon phase is over now. The way in which Facebook has evolved from a seemingly innocuous melange of MySpace and Friends Reunited, with improved UX, to an invasive and rather creepy petri dish of hate and conspiracy theories has opened our eyes to social media giants. TikTok will rightly be under the same scrutiny.