Short-form video is certainly rising in popularity, and with a new app sweeping up the young-adult market, businesses and brands are jumping on board.
While you’ve most likely heard of the social media platform TikTok, which allows users to upload 15-second-long looping videos, you might not yet recognize the power and influence it holds. Boasting over 1 billion downloads, it’s well on its way to becoming the next hit social media channel.
You can argue it is already, as users are thrilled to find creative ways to play with the app’s tool kit, adding sound, filters and visual tricks to their videos. And while you might think that sounds like a platform for the teens and young adults who spent their time on long-gone Vine, think again.
Guac and TikTok
As brands hope to gain entry into the exclusive online social circle of younger people, TikTok gives them a real shot, and some companies are taking full advantage of the possibilities. Take Chipotle, for example. The fast casual Mexican food chain creates videos on TikTok that showcase its fresh ingredients, adding popular songs as the video soundtrack.
To fully engage a young audience, Chipotle created branded challenges to get users to make videos pointing back to Chipotle. The brand’s latest challenge was #GuacDance, asking their audience to create clips of them dancing and celebrating National Avocado Day — Chipotle, not coincidentally, was also giving out free scoops of guacamole that day. The videos created so much attention for Chipotle, that the restaurant passed out more free guacamole than they ever have before.
The #GuacDance hashtag has over 970 million views, making Chipotle’s campaign the highest-performing challenge created by a brand on the TikTok app in the U.S.
Without having to pay for content or ads, Chipotle stole the attention of its audience and passed out a company record 802,000 sides of guacamole — and you can bet customers weren’t just getting free guac and heading out the door.
More to short-form
With the potential to reel in a large audience, rumors of Instagram also wanting a piece of the action have spread. A reverse engineer revealed the app plans to steal TikTok’s thunder and create its own version to avoid losing their users to a different app. It is no surprise that even a top social media platform like Instagram recognizes the importance of the content TikTok allows users to produce.
Even if you have no interest in joining TikTok and its never-ending feed of videos, short-form videos will soon appear on other platforms, so companies and brands will feel pressured to participate in making their own quick clips and campaigns to take advantage of the format. With an opportunity to go viral or to at least participate in viral challenges, it is much easier to connect with a young audience through videos on TikTok.
To find success with young audiences — not only on TikTok, but across all social media — creative, off-the-wall thinking is key, as well as following trends on what platforms are most popular. At the same time, you can’t forget your key messages and story. No matter how you tell it, that will always be of paramount importance.
WordWrite has the expertise and the tools to help you tell your story through multiple lenses. Let us know how we can help you craft your story.
