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Here is your weekly dosis 💉 of TikTok related infos. Today we talk about
🙏 Charli, Jesus and the American dream
🎨 Painter Man
📟 Why you should be posting 73 times a day or less
🙏 Charli, Jesus and the American dream
As expected Charli D’Amelio (an American social media personality and dancer) became the first person to earn 100 million followers on TikTok. With a slight delay due to the D’Amelio dinner incident.
Why should i care: In order to understand a platform and to use it you should understand why protagonists are successful and you should have an idea about the talk of the town.
Mainstream media reacted quite differently to the news. Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi wrote a personal text about becoming Officially Old™ including – amongst others – this great sentence: “How was it that I couldn’t comprehend the cultural impact of someone whose last supper caused a bigger kerfuffle among their followers than Jesus’s?”
German newspaper Sueddeutsche reacted with a lame text that was published in austrian and swiss newspapers too. “Why did the 16 year old become a megastar? Only the algorithm knows.” This sounds like an excuse for not doing your homework pointing to an ominous algorithm (that is always written by people) while in fact there was a heated debate on Twitter if Charli “was hand picked by TikTok” or not.
Wealth distribution is accruing to a small percentage of people
With better arguments for the “not being picked”-side if you ask me. Despite the fact that there was an interesting link to an interview with Alex Zhu (former Co-founder of Musical.ly), including this sentence: In this new land, you have to build a centralized economy in the early days. This means that wealth distribution is accruing to a small percentage of people in your land. You make sure they successfully build an audience and wealth. This makes them role models for the country (and platform).
The captain of the field-hockey team
So why is Charli so successful? “Nobody seems to be able to articulate exactly why D’Amelio is so popular, but it has something to do with her being down-to-earth”, writes Mahdawi. While Rachel Monroe in The Atlantic describes it like that: "Charli’s appeal is tied to her ability to be both relatable and aspirational. She manages to telegraph an ordinary kind of specialness; she’s the pretty babysitter, or the captain of the field-hockey team." And after all she is a teenager, Rebecca Jennings reminds us: “You can like Charli D’Amelio for seeming like a ‘normal’ high schooler, but you also have to accept it when she acts like one. Being sassy at the dinner table, at least to this childless adult, seems like a terrible reason to get someone canceled.”
Read more on how Charli D’Amelio faced the internet’s harshest critics and won or dive deeper by watching Charli and her entire family being interviewed by Gary Vaynerchuk back in December 2019 to understand more.
And maybe then is the perfect time to check out a TikTok ranking in order to pick 2 or 3 accounts for further investigations. Otherwise i oblige you to check out Trisha Paytas.
🎨 Painter Man & Florida
Open this YouTube video in another tab. Come back. And read the story: Tony Piloseno who worked a part-time job at a local Sherwin-Williams store was fired after the company discovered his popular paint-mixing TikTok channel @tonesterpaints. Oh what a mistake. This guy just loves blending together colors (and blueberries).
More than one million people follow him. "I loved the job immediately," he said. "I love how colors blend together, what goes with what... It’s hard to explain, but I really enjoy mixing paint. I like showing what stuff it can do." And then this: The Internet’s Latest Obsession Is Watching This Aussie Frantically Try To Guess Paint Colours.
They FIRED YOU?? It's 2020 and companies still don't understand the benefit of digital/social marketing.
Tony Piloseno has a new job now. Florida Paints swoops in to develop products with fired Sherwin-Williams employee behind viral TikTok account. Tony received offers from nearly every major paint company but has decided to work for a smaller competitor in Florida. There's a lesson to be learned here, writes AdAge.
Indeed: Embrace, encourage and be fast. Read more in newsletter 20 🤿 Marketing Deep Dive: Turning employees into brand influencers. Or squander your time in the jacuzzi for the eyes with some more paint mixing ASMR.
📟 Why you should be posting 73 times a day or less
How often should I upload videos for getting likes and fans. That is a question often asked. With some funny answers on Quora and else. I personally was intrigued by the performance of Trisha Paytas, a so called media personality and self-proclaimed troll lately. 73 videos a day. 73. 73 is a lot. 3.8M followers do not seem to mind.
It is important to take into account that the algorithm throws carefully chosen video productions and a slice of weird stuff on your For You page. You will not see every single production by a creator you follow unless you check out his or hers account – when you want context or when you can not get enough.
Due to the fact that TikTok is not centered around the old follower/follow ratio and that it is not about the latest and freshest content too the game is a bit different to other social media resulting in a “more is more”-paradigm. The app makes it simple to produce content en passant and until now i have not heard about incidents where the app sanctioned the production of too much content. Why should it.
In an environment coined by an “always too much” it is important to be seen. To enable entry points. Better to have more lifeboats than just one in an ocean of content. Sorry, not sure if this metaphor fits. Gary Vaynerchuk once suggested to post 8-15 times a day. Good lord. Then Washington Post normally posts 2 times a day. And the Golden Rule of TikTok (as found on some random website) seems to be: Post at least once day! Post regularly.
I will remind myself of that one day.
That is it. You made it. Thx for reading. If you want more there is quite some stuff waiting on Twitter, e.g. a great article on the Bimbo being back. And now tell a friend about this newsletter. Thx a lot.
Take care.
Marcus 🔮