TikTok Newsletter 13
🇺🇳 Digital Diplomacy 🐉Disinformation 🧃Marketing Strategies
Hello to all you new and old subscribers!
My name is Marcus.
I have been working as a journalist and trainer for Deutsche Welle, Germany´s international braodcaster for more than 10 years. Besides that i have co-founded two companies (serious games & AR/VR). Currently i am deeply intrigued by TikTok – the high density content, the multiclip aesthetic, the sheer amount of cults, memes and genres, the creative possibilities, the dynamic and the geopolitical hassle.
In this newsletter i present my current findings, i show best and worst cases, dig into topics and point you to tipps, tricks and more. Hope you like it. If you want a special topic covered or you do have questions or need an interview partner. Please let me know!
This week we talk about:
🇺🇳 Digital Diplomacy
🐉Disinformation
🧃Marketing Strategies
- - -
🇺🇳 Digital Diplomacy
Andreas Sandre works with the italian embassy in the US. He spent a lot of his summer 2020 researching, interviewing people and experimenting on TikTok. The result of all that is a Handbook for TikTok for non-profits and digital diplomacy on Medium. If you have 23 minutes i suggest that you check it out. Why?
Because the sheer amount of numbers and names is impressive, including the United Nations (40.9K Followers; 275K Likes), World Health Organization (2.6M Followers; 8.9M Likes), IOM - UN Migration (1.5M Followers; 2M Likes), UN Refugee Agency (1.1M Followers; 2M Likes) or UNICEF (59.2K Followers; 3.6M Likes) and many more. Many global and regional non-governmental organizations and non-profits are active on the platform as well.
Andreas has a list with more than 400 organizations on TikTok. 👈
Especially interesting are some linked articles like We were the first global humanitarian organisation to partner with TikTok. Here’s what we learned so far telling the story of the IFRC & TikTok. IFRC stands for International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The world's largest humanitarian network. With some beautiful sentences like “That was our attempt at driving attention to World Blood Donor Day. It sort of failed miserably. But that’s okay! It was our first try. We had a lot to learn.”
While checking out some of the 400 accounts i could see that many politicians e.g. Emmanuel Macron are there but not (yet) active at all. Their social media teams seem to have reserved the name like throwing a towel on a deck chair waiting for the platform to gain even more (?!) relevance. 🏖️
🇸🇬Singapore to me is a special use case that needs further investigation. The government here is doing a pretty good job that could be related to an article saying that: ByteDance, the Chinese owner of video-sharing app TikTok, is planning to make Singapore its beachhead for the rest of Asia as part of its global expansion, according to people familiar with the matter.
This might be interesting for you too:
🐶 Political Campaigning in #12, including Matteo Salvini half-naked
🎷 Politicians in #04, including an excel-sheet with german politicians on TikTok
🐉Disinformation
After last weeks firefighter debunking false stories this week i saw an article on Medium TikTok: The disinformation is everywhere by Elliot Alderson, a hacker who obviously likes Mr. Robot and is associated to Predicta Lab.
The article analyses the “Biden is a pedophile” accusation i personally had never heard of. If you have not seen it on TikTok is because TikTok blacklisted all the hashtags with the word pedo: #pedophile, #pedoelite, #pedo, #pedogate, #pedophilia, #pedowood, #pedoltics, #pedohunter, as Elliot writes.
He then digs deeper into and identifies “50+ videos with a total of 451k views”
It is an interesting insight into the world of e.g. 16 year old self proclaimed “christian conservative” Savannah and her 422K followers using the QAnon hashtags #savethechildren and #joebidenisapedo. Elliot writes: “This is how today’s disinformation work: a pretty popular teenage girl spreading conspiracy stuff to her young audience.”
TikTok is quite busy deleting hashtag pedo and other. Quote:
In the first half of 2020 (January 1 - June 30), 104,543,719 videos were removed globally for violating our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, which is less than 1% of all videos uploaded on TikTok. (Source: TikTok Shares Latest Data on Content Removals and Enforcement Actions)
If you as a journalist want to get better at monitoring TikTok and how to investigate videos posted here, let me point you to Newsletter 04 🩺 Investigating TikTok, including a talk by Laura Garcia who gives a great intro and shows some ways on how to find certain videos, how to extract infos and for example find date and time stamps. Here is a twitter version:
🧃Marketing Strategies
I spent Thursday morning watching a bunch of talks of this years TikTok Marketing Strategies (Europe) to get an idea where we stand now and what kind of tipps current “experts” can give on growing and succeeding on the platform.
It was a mixed bag. But great. And free. Looking at you german organizers of TikTok related events 👀. Besides the very obvious (start with the why) there were very good insights by e.g. Darius Mora who is Chief Marketing Officer at Reflectly. He has a TikTok Marketing 2020: Grow Your Account & Master TikTok Ads Udemy course. Or by Jidé Maduako who runs the influencer network Yoke in the UK, responsible among other things for Wave House.
Here are some of the things i learned or relearned:
* that you should show your phone in the video to increase engagement
* music is even more important than you think
* the start of the video (first two seconds) are key
* consistency when posting. And: more is more. 3-5 a day?!
* without language your content can go global
* people around here do not “like” that much
* views are more important. watch time is important
* followers are not that important. Again: views
* the average views are important to become a proper micro-influencer
* make it personal. Even if your are a global business
* authenticity is key. Do not try too hard
That was that. Oh and by the way. Boring, mundane businesses have an exhilarating, viral life on TikTok. I never spent much time thinking about hydraulic press machines.
See you next week. Bye Bye
Marcus 🥬