Written by: Waseem Abbas
Posted on: August 03, 2022 | 
| 中文
The Rise of TikTok has been dramatic
With 1.1 billion active users, TikTok has surpassed Snapchat and Twitter in the race of widely used social media apps globally. It is only behind Facebook and YouTube, and it is predicted that the Chinese app will surpass YouTube by 2024, although the Google-owned video streaming site was launched 12 years before TikTok. It is intriguing to dig out the underlying causes of TikTok's sudden rise, despite obstacles placed by different governments and efforts by rival apps to present alternatives to TikTok.
Famous social media apps
TikTok, originally launched as Douyin in 2016 in China, is a short-form video sharing app, primarily for lip-syncing and dancing on famous videos. In 2017, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, bought Musical.ly, a US-based music app, and merged the two and named it 'TikTok'. The merger of Musical.ly added 80 million users to TikTok, making it a popular app not only in China and Asia, but also in the USA and across Europe. Officially launched in 2018, TikTok was downloaded 693 million times in 2019 and 850 million times in 2020, which presents a challenge to the dominance of other social media apps.
Khabane Lame, the most followed person on TikTok
According to Forbes, over sixty percent of TikTok users belong to Generation Z, people born after 1996. Research by McKinsey & Company reveals that people from Gen Z are expressive, have a high level of digital literacy, reject stereotypes, propagate individual truth, connect easily with people of the same tastes and dispositions, and prefer to consume content in videos format and are open to change. As TikTok allows its users to create and share 15-second-long videos and connect with people from across the globe in an unsophisticated manner, it becomes the preferred social haven for Gen Z. While earlier generations preferred to consume content, Gen Z prefers to create content. TikTok has erased the expertise and specialization factors from content production, which is empowering for TikTokers. It is in this sense that understanding a platform and its relations with its user base is of paramount importance to gauge the future emerging trends on social media.
Due to its dramatic rise, TikTok has posed a great challenge to other social media apps, particularly to Mark Zuckerberg's owned trio of Facebook (FB), Insta and WhatsApp. TikTok's ad revenues are expected to be around 11.6 billion USD this year, way more than the combined ad income of Snapchat and Twitter. The threat TikTok poses to Zuckerberg's digital conglomerate is real and rising. The disturbing data revealed (for Facebook) is that the people under 25 are switching from FB to Snapchat and TikTok, although FB users over the age of 55 are increasing. If the current trend persists, Facebook may lose a large chunk of its users in near future.
TikTok is the fastest growing social media app in the world
Zuckerberg-owned Meta has recently modified its analytics, and FB and Insta have turned into video streaming apps. Facebook and Insta also introduced TikTok-like short videos known as reels, which Meta's analytics push into users' feeds according to the client's taste. In April 2022, Zuckerberg confessed that reels accounted for 1/5th of the time people spent on Instagram. Facebook has now started showing video suggestions to its users, an essential feature of TikTok, that the algorithms think you might like. These dramatic changes in Insta and FB's analytics have sparked protests. Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, who both have massive Insta followings, shared on their Insta page: "Make Instagram Instagram again. Stop trying to be TikTok." Responding to users' concerns, Instagram's head, Adam Mosseri, said that the company is not getting rid of what people love to see, but stressed the need to evolve, saying 'because the world is changing quickly, and we're gonna have to change along with it.'
Kylie Jenner's Insta story criticizing Instagram
Like all other social media apps, TikTok empowers the powerless and gives voice to the voiceless. Anybody with a cell phone and an internet connection can upload a video, and if the content has what it takes to be successful, there is nothing stopping it. Elitism in various forms is rampant in other social media apps: the 'intellectual worth' fetches followers on Twitter, the aesthetics and beautiful snaps garner attention on Insta, and sponsored videos mostly propel YouTube and Facebook. TikTok has reduced the class barriers and has allowed the underprivileged to showcase their talent without any hindrances.
TikTok videos were initially 15 to 60 seconds long and were mainly based only on lip-syncing, which led to the accusations of it being the promoter of mediocrity and against the morals and ethics of our society in Pakistan. TikTokers from underprivileged background showcase their individuality and have fun without any censorship, hence it was criticised and banned in Pakistan multiple times. Nadeem Farooq Paracha commented on it: ‘working class having fun offends the middle-class sense of morality’.
TikTok's top trends
Asif Raza, a TikToker based in Attock, admits that Tiktok has given him the opportunity to show his talent, but he is cognizant that "people, especially the older generations, look down at you when they get to know that you use TikTok." But he is happy that he is getting fame and earning too. Many TikTokers, in both Pakistan and abroad, have become international celebrities because of TikTok, like the Senegal-born Khabane Lame, who is the most followed Tiktoker in the world with 147 million followers. Pakistan's most followed TikToker, Jannat Mirza, has entered showbiz with Syed Noor's "Tere Bajree Di Rakhi".
Jannat Mirza, Pakistan's most followed TikToker
TikTok's popularity has been unstoppable, despite governmental regulations and interventions. It has been banned in the USA, India, Pakistan and several other countries on various pretexts, but they have failed to ban it permanently due to public pressure. TikTok's popularity is here to stay, infact, it will increase with time and will challenge the sway of Zuckerberg's hold on the world of social media.
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