TikTok Newsletter 23
🤓 Two questions 🏆 100 Awards 🦠 Vaccines 👜 Celine vs. Gucci
Hi subscriber!
Here is your weekly dosis 💉 of TikTok related infos. Before that let me ask you two questions 🙋just hit reply to this email 📨 (i’m m@marcus-boesch.de) and tell me:
1) Do you have a personal or a brand TikTok account?
2) What is the biggest challenge you are facing with your account(s)?
Let me know, and I’ll try to adjust this newsletter to be the best resource it can be.
And now let us talk about:
🏆 Lists, reviews and awards
🦠 Covid, vaccines and #teamhalo
👜 Celine vs. Guci
🐸 What else
🏆 TikTok 100 & The TikTok Room Awards
“The TikTok Room awards prove how little ‘real’ awards shows matter anymore, and how much mainstream celebrity culture has to catch up on”, writes Rebecca Jennings on Vox. Wait, what?!
The TikTok Room is an Insta account devoted to TikTok drama, founded by to teenagers (Elasia and Nat) from New Jersey and Texas. Jennings wrote about it in February: The gossip accounts telling you which TikTok star is dating which YouTuber. Conclusion: “They just might be the future of media.”
Nine months later Elasia and Nat, their 1.9M followers and their awards “might be the future of celebrity fandom.” There were 28 categories and there were two names constantly popping up: Larray and Sienna Gomez. You do not know them? Well, there “are rapidly expanding and increasingly niche fandoms for more and more TikTok creators” and mainstream celebrity culture is catching up.
Interestingly enough TikTok just four days later announced its very own TikTok 100 - our 2020 Year in Review. Here is the US version, the UK version and the German version.
I spent way too much time checking out every single german account mentioned. My head was dizzy, my mouth was dry and i couldn’t stop watching @macroyfing zooming in a syringe. I encourage you to learn more about the current now by picking a random category of accounts. 2020. Over soon.
🦠Covid, vaccines and #teamhalo
Kalhan Rosenblatt reports about “an emerging group of TikTokers have gone viral for sharing information about the Covid-19 vaccines...Several TikTok users have posted videos of themselves participating in trials, and at least one video, in which a doctor weighs the differences among some of the vaccine trials, has received more than a million views.”
There is another initiative called Team Halo, established in partnership with the Vaccine Confidence Project at the University of London’s school of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The Hashtag #teamhalo on TikTok has 23.8M views. It is fascinating to see how scientists directly address questions and concerns of users.
In fact you are not missing a middle men aka journalist providing the means of production and a platform while these scientists do a pretty cool job of combining knowledge + media literacy + interactive communication. Quote: Follow these scientists working to get us safe and effective Covid vaccines. Ask them anything.
👜 Celine vs. Gucii
Luxury fashion brands are into computergames these days (Vogue Business).Balenciaga is just about to launch a browserbased game. Oh, and then there is TikTok. There is an interesting take on the Good TikTok Creative Newsletter comparing Gucci and Celine. The latter was here first.
“Once you get into Celine’s actual TikTok profile, you see a consistent visual aesthetic...each video is meticulously planned and manicured to fit a consistent vibe ...it is beautiful creative”, writes Anthony McGuire just to continue like that: “At the same time, I can’t help but feel that Celine is trying too hard to maintain an Instagram aesthetic on their TikTok profile. Does this work on TikTok?” That is a fair point. The Celine account is nice but it feels dead on the inside.
What a difference Gucci makes here. Way more intriguing due to playful layered storytelling, variety, high density, etc. Or as McGuire puts it: “Gucci captures the right tone of TikTok. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and the brand really makes an effort to ‘play’ with the platform.”
The important take-away here is: Understand the rules and the surroundings of the platform, adopt, play and push boundaries. Stop being to corporate, to shy, to lame, to superficial.
🐸 What else
On Twitter, Frogs Were Mostly Nazis, On TikTok, They’re Often Queer (Hyperallergic). Cartel TikTok (NYT). Healthy conversation about mental illness (Hyperallergic) Depression TikTok (Twitter Thread). TikTok is testing longer 3 minute videos (The Verge). And Versailles Palace is now on TikTok too (Bloomberg). 🤷
This is the end.
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Speak soon.