By Guest

With dozens of apps competing for users’ attention, TikTok is the latest front-runner in the war to keep people scrolling. The Chinese-owned video app is the fastest-growing social media platform of all time, with roughly 80 million monthly active users.

With its ForYou page built for discoverability, short-form videos, and a heart-shaped “like” button, you might mistake TikTok for just another Instagram. Although TikTok is most certainly trying to overtake the photo-sharing app, this isn’t only the battle of Instagram vs. TikTok. In fact, Instagram is finding TikTok much harder to knock off than platforms like Snapchat. TikTok wants to be the No. 1 social platform in the world — and it has the advantage of learning from its competitors’ past mistakes.

Let’s take a look at TikTok’s playbook for becoming the best of the best in the social media world.

Step 1: Poach the smartest people in every room.

The first part of TikTok’s strategy has involved recruiting top talent from other social media giants to recreate their successes. The company has already hired dozens of ex-employees from Facebook and Google, including Blake Chandlee, Facebook’s former vice president of global partnerships.

Trevor Johnson, former director of marketing operations at Instagram, is now the head of marketing in Europe for TikTok, and David Hoctor jumped ship from Facebook to work on TikTok’s brand partnerships. While talent poaching isn’t unusual in Silicon Valley, these recent hires and early initiatives are strong signs that the future of TikTok hinges on its ability to build an ad solution that competes with the likes of Facebook.

Marketers familiar with both platforms find TikTok’s ad-buying interface bears an uncanny resemblance to Facebook’s. If you know how to make Facebook ads work for your brand, TikTok is a natural arrow to add to your performance marketing quiver.

Step 2: Build a better ad platform.

TikTok seemed to realize early that it could build the product of every Facebook engineer’s dreams if they had the benefit of experience. By the time Facebook introduced its ad platform in 2007, Google had already created an incredibly compelling model with AdSense. To compete, Facebook lured in large holding companies with enticingly low CPMs. By the time the news broke that Facebook had been inflating its metrics, the company had successfully grown its ad platform into one of the largest in the world.

The platform had managed to build some of the most robust user profiles in existence. Whenever publishers installed Facebook’s software development kit, Facebook would extract and store data from each of those sources. Once it had a gigantic data pool, it had another compelling offer for advertisers.

Like Facebook, TikTok gathers a wealth of information on its users and relies on data-driven decision-making to inform its next moves. More than that, TikTok has established its standing …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer

Author: Aaron