Social Media trivia: 60 facts about TikTok

Many people consider TikTok as the new Instagram app, as more and more, mostly young, people start using it.

While some people are using it like crazy, some others are wondering what exactly is it, how it became so popular, and it actually looks like a whole different social media world for them. But here we are, in order to solve all of these questions!

TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service.
It is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based internet technology company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming.
It is used to create short dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos.
ByteDance first launched Douyin for the China market in September 2016.
Later, TikTok has launched in 2017 for iOS and Android abroad.
It became available in the United States after merging with Musical.ly on 2 August 2018.
TikTok and Douyin are similar to each other but run on separate servers to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions.
The application allows users to create short music and lip-sync videos of 3 to 15 secondsand short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds.
TikTok has offices except for China in Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.
The app is popular in East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the United States, Turkey, Russia.
Since it started in Asia, it is normal to be very popular in Asian countries. The ones with the largest “hype” are Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
After merging with Musical.ly in August, downloads rose and TikTok became the most downloaded app in the US in October 2018.
TikTok is the first Chinese app to achieve this, and one of the few out of Silicon Valley.
In 2018, it was available in over 150 markets and in 75 languages.
In February 2019, TikTok, together with Douyin, hit one billion downloads globally,.
This number was calculated by excluding Android installs in China.
In 2019, media outlets cited TikTok as the 7th-most-downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019
It was also the most-downloaded app on the App Store in 2018 and 2019.
Since May 2020, Kevin Mayer is CEO of TikTok.
He is also the COO of parent company ByteDance.
Kevin Mayer was previously he was chairman of the Walt Disney Direct-to-Consumer & Internation
TikTok app is currently available in 141 countries.
It is in the top 25 overall in 135 of these countries.
Of course, influence marketing couldn’t be missing, so on TikTok, you can find many TikTok influencers.
They are not so popular as on Instagram. At least they are not, yet.
That means that the money is less right now, but since the TikTok platform is on the rise the potential of good sponsorships, and more money is positive.
Active daily users in China (mostly of the Douyin version) now exceed 400 million. Douyin has established itself as the largest knowledge, culture, and art platform in China.
In November 2018 TikTok finally took the coveted #1 position in the Google Play Store in the USA, with 2.78 million downloads.
It took 200 days for the Chinese development team to create the original version of Douyin / TikTok.
@lorengray, American singer and social media personality Loren Gray is now TikTok’s most successful account outside China.
She actually has 40.3 million fans on TikTok.
She took over the coveted Number 1 position from previous leaders, Lisa and Lena Mantler
They deleted their account in March 2019, due to privacy concerns and loss of interest in the platform.
TikTok “motto” is Make Your Day/
The first prototype of Musical.ly was released in April 2014, and the official version was launched in August of that year.
It took Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang about 6 months to build the product, after originally designing it as an online self-learning platform.
By October 2018, TikTok was earning $3.5 million per month from in-app purchases, such as emojis and digital gifts.
With the introduction of the formal advertising market, it is likely that TikTok’s income is now considerably higher than this.
TikTok is famous for its challenges.
Some are organic, and some are sponsored, by the collaboration with famous institutions, and enterprises.
Some brands invest in TikTok for TikTok challenges, such as Vogue, that created the #VogueChallenge.
42. Vogue Challenge asked for people around the world to pretend they are photo shooting for a Vogue’s cover and to upload it on TikTok.
Sometimes challenges get out of control, such #CornChallenge.
Corn Challenge asks for people to shoot a video where they eat corn while it is stuck on a working drill.
Skull – Breaker Challenge also led some teens and kids to the hospital, so better not to try it.
Also, it is very popular in TikTok for users to dance.
TikTok is using this to raise awareness for important, social issues, such as global warming.
EduTalk is used as a hashtag in order to promote motivational and educational videos about a variety of themes.
This project aims to propelling the creative industry, and its contribution to the global economy.
Another good cause that TikTok strived for was about animal protection.
By using the hashtag #PetBff, TikTok worked with animal welfare organizations, and animal shelters for International Homeless’ Animals Day 2019.
For every video posted on this day, TikTok gave 1$ to its partners that work for animal protection.
In total, users had spent $50 million on TikTok as of the end of October 2018 (before TikTok introduced advertising).
Android’s smartphone market dominance, more than 90% of the TikTok downloads have been made to Android devices.
The sole exception to this is the USA, where there are more iOS users.
The vast majority of India’s 190.6 million TikTok fans use the Android version of the app.
SimilarWeb ranks TikTok Lite as #6 in its list of free video players/editors in India.
The full version fo the app ranks #15.
Most of its users are young, with 25.8% aged between 18 and 24. A further 24.5% are aged 25-34, suggesting that many TikTok users have stayed with the app, despite reaching their 25th birthday.
68% of engaged TikTok users claim to have watched somebody else’s video in the last month.