Just don’t call it a pivot to video — this is one with much lower stakes. Yes, publishers are producing more video for a platform they don’t control. No, they’re not doing so in search of ad dollars. Instead, they’re doing it in search of new audiences.

What little stakes there are around these investments revolve around experimentation and marketing.

That’s clear in the wide-ranging content strategies employed by the news publishers on TikTok.

Take CNN for example. Since September 2021, the news publisher released 846 videos — or an average of 14 videos per week. So far, those videos helped CNN rack up 1.3 million followers and 11.3 million likes.

Then there’s The Daily Wire. Similarly to CNN, it has produced a total of 812 videos since October 2021. However, its presence on TikTok has already far exceeded CNN despite having started on the app a month later. So far the American news site has accumulated 2.8 million followers and 63 million likes.

Focusing on TikTok content

The difference between the two: the type of content published and length of each post.

While CNN focuses on snippets of actual daily news stories as they unfold using videos that are anywhere up to almost 10 minutes long, The Daily Wire concentrates on entertaining news and uses TikTok trends and filters in posts that only last about a minute.

Being a prolific on TikTok will only get a publisher so far. It’s the actual content of the video themselves that will set apart the ones with real staying power.

But figuring this out will take time. Not least because news isn’t necessarily something that’s intuitive to the platform. Entertaining content is. This puts more emphasis on users liking or engaging (i.e commenting or sharing) with each video post, which subsequently influences what’s on their For You page.

“Publishers must be prepared to lose editorial control on TikTok, even more than on other platforms,” commented Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders. “You can’t guarantee your video will be widely shared on the day it’s uploaded.”

The Washington Post’s foray

It’s why those behind The Washington Post’s videos on TikTok are always talking about meeting people where they are and creating content for the platform.

The publication posts a mix of long and short form TikToks, mixing original series, comedy posts, and more serious ones. For example, The Post has joined in on a trend dubbed Misinformation Mondays — as a way to combat inaccurate stories.

The news publisher, which started its account back in May 2019, was indeed one of the first to invest in …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron