WJR Business Beat with Jeff Sloan: TikTok is Now Number One (Episode 169)

Good morning.

Well, for those of you like me who have lost your kids to endless hours of what seems like nothing more than vacuous staring at their mobile screens, you’re not alone. A closer look reveals that the culprit is likely an app with the highest engagement rating of any app in the world now. That’s right, it’s TikTok.

App analytics platform App Annie reports that average time spent per user per month on TikTok is up 325%.

Perhaps more notable than the raw figure is the fact that TikTok now exceeds Facebook on this measure, and it’s now on pace to reach 1.2 billion monthly active users by the end of 2021.

And that active user base consists of a growing set of eyeballs that goes way beyond the gen Z audience it started with. Moving now across demographics and becoming a big player in the social media space. And now, it’s one that every small business owner must consider as a potential marketing channel.

For those of you who don’t know TikTok, it’s a short-form video platform where users can find and enjoy quick hitting videos created and uploaded by users. It started out under the brand Musical.ly and sold four years ago to the behemoth Bytedance for over $800 million. Bytedance then rebranded the app TikTok and has created a loyal following of users that advertisers on the platform can reach.

The strategic implications for small businesses is that now short form video campaigns can be created that get served up to TikTok’s highly engaged audience, and users then experience the power of advertising as really what amounts to highly engaging entertainment.

So, if you’re searching for a new and novel way to reach an engaged audience, you must consider TikTok in the mix of ways to create that critical awareness leading to customer acquisition and engagement.

I’m Jeff Sloan, founder and CEO of StartupNation.com, and that’s today’s Business Beat on the Great Voice of the Great Lakes, WJR.