TikTok Newsletter 31

TikTok Trend Report. Aesthetics Wiki. TikTok TV. JournoTok.

Hi subscriber,

this is Understanding TikTok your weekly infusion 💉 of TikTok related news. My name is Marcus. We start with a little newsflash:

💥 A US plan to force the sale of TikTok’s American operations to a group including Oracle  and Walmart has been shelved indefinitely, reports Wall Street Journal (Feb. 10, 2021). Walmart continues to work more closely with TikTok regardless of an investment (see Newsletter 26 🛍️ TikTok Live Shopping).

💥 TikTok and Universal Music Group have announced the formation of what they’re calling an “expanded global alliance” (The Verge, Feb 8, 2021). Quote: TikTok now has deals with the companies that represent just about all of popular music. Which is all to say that to the music business, TikTok has become too important to fail.

💥 The FT sums up TikTok’s ecommerce expansion in the US (Feb 7, 2021). It includes partnerships with Shopify (Techcrunch), integration of Teespring (Mashable),  the already mentioned live shopping (Walmart) and a first major deal with an advertising agency WPP (TikTok). According to the FT TikTok’s biggest pull is its vast, and partly untapped, young audience. 40% of people on TikTok do not have a Facebook account and 63% are not on Twitter, according to one marketer who has recently been pitched.

What else? This week we talk about:

🧢 TikTok Trend Report
🐬 Aesthetics Wiki
🖥️ TikTok TV
📰 JournoTok – Superwahljahr 2021

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🧢 TikTok Trend Report

TikTok has published a new rising trends report, which highlights a range of key topics that saw significant growth in interest on the platform throughout 2020, writes SocialMediaToday (Feb 9, 2021).

According to TikTok “over the past 12 months, we've seen major shifts in consumer interests and behavior”. The company therefore has “identified the content categories that grew the most and the ones that remained among the most popular ones on TikTok in 2020.”

The mixture of categories is wild - ranging from camping, livestock & poultry to romance, pets, outfit to news & events (top growth category #01). The methodology remains rather misty. There are “dozens of categories” and biggest hashtags. And there are 19 country reports that you can click through. Each lists three or four major topics. Not that surprising at all times to be honest. Guess what – in the german speaking part of Europe #Fussball is a big topic. Nevertheless the listed hashtags provide a nice way to dive deeper. And you can test your hashtag literacy. I was not aware of  #OOTD. Outfit of the day. 📍Here is the link to the TikTok Trend Report.


🐬 Aesthetics Wiki 

One of the reasons that got me started to investigate TikTok more was when i learned about Deep / Alt / Elite TikTok in the summer of 2020. And i have spent endless hours watching Cottagecore and Dark Academia related TikToks. Kaitlyn Tiffany has written a fantastic article for The Atlantic: 📍Cottagecore Was Just the Beginning.

I made it to Aesthetics Wiki before. I just never took the time to find out more. And this is what the article does brilliantly.  Here are some snippets, but you should just read the entire article: The Aesthetics Wiki is organized by suffix: “Wave” has 17 main pages; “Goth” has 14; “Core” has 125. There are also 27 pages dedicated to the various subgenres of “academia,” which can be dark, light, chaotic, romantic, pastel, or darkest, among other qualifiers.

The Wiki is hosted on Fandom, a for-profit site that uses Wikipedia’s open-source code. Traffic grew by 9,974 percent in 2020. Today, 258 contributors make about 60 additions a day, and 57 percent of the site’s users are between the ages of 18 and 24, according to Fandom. Maybe unsurprisingly, at the moment, the most popular aesthetics are wildly different but united in an expression of deep nostalgia.

If you want to get a deeper understanding of what is happening in the more interesting parts of TikTok here is your go-to-resource.

🖥️ TikTok TV

TikTok is launching on smart TVs in France, Germany and the UK, writes Chris Stokel-Walker for Wired.📍TikTok’s next big thing? A strange plan to take over your TV.  If that sounds like a bizarre plan to you, industry experts see potential because people are often enjoying TikTok videos together and are already used to a diversification of content providers.

The idea makes sense from TikTok’s point of view. The move onto TV hints at their advertising ambitions (see above) and it might help keep its creator base who is keen to enter the traditional TV screen too (see D’Amelio / Hulu). TikTok as an experience and community evolves and changes, says Rich Waterworth, TikTok’s managing director for the UK and Europe. The direction seems clear: Middle of the road aka the mainstream.

📰 JournoTok – Superwahljahr 2021

While British journalists are busy dancing to the BBC news theme, Funke Mediengruppe, Germany's third largest newspaper and magazine publisher has started a collaboration with TikTok #LernenMitTikTok the german equivalent to #LearningWithTikTok (german press release) together with seven other media outlets in Germany and Switzerland.

The account @duhastdiewahl is targeted at first-time voters in the so-called super-election year 2021. In August 2020 Funke had started its first TikTok account @funke_zentralredaktion. Both accounts star journalist Amelie Marie Weber. If a young target audience gets excited by the pretty old school and Wikipedia-heavy approach remains to be seen. Either way a group of right-wing trolls is already starting to spam the comments section.

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That’s it. You have reached the end. Thx for reading. If you want to praise, complain, just chat or have your TikTok account reviewed. Write a mail. You want more? Here is a NYT article on Ballet TikTok. Here is the Baked Feta Pasta Hype. Gwen Stefani failing. Justin Bieber Valentine. And here is High Heels! A silly game that blew up on Tiktok.

Ciao, Marcus