Tiktok
2020
Aaron Dinin teaches social media and entrepreneurship at Duke University. Ironically, he’s not an avid social media poster, but he does spend a bit too much time on Twitter, and you can follow him @AaronDinin.
Within a week of the shelter-in-place orders spurred by COVID-19, a student in my social marketing course made the following assertion:
“Instagram is dead right now because nobody is doing anything cool and there aren’t any good pictures to post. TikTok is where it’s at.”
As someone who studies and teaches social media, I suspect I’ve paid closer attention to the rise of TikTok than most middle-aged men. I’d already surmised that the pandemic would have a huge impact on the platform’s growth, and my student’s statement was a manifestation of that suspicion. However, tying TikTok’s growth with Instagram’s demise might not be accurate. On the surface, yes, Instagram and TikTok are both app-based social media platforms that allow users to scroll through short, engaging content produced by other people. But those similarities are superficial. At their core, TikTok and Instagram serve different purposes.
To explain the fundamental difference between TikTok and Instagram, let’s take a closer look at my student’s assertion. For her — a 20-year-old student whose Instagram feed is filled with other 20-somethings doing things that 20-somethings do — concluding the pandemic has caused a temporary slowdown in ‘Gram-worthy pics isn’t unreasonable. But that says more about her and her network than the platform.
In contrast, consider my use of Instagram. As a 30-something parent of two young children, my Instagram feed was permanently hijacked by friends posting pictures of their kids a long time ago. Since the pandemic is giving my peers plenty of extra time with their children, they have more new content to share than ever before.
In other words, my student and I have been having different Instagram experiences during the pandemic. Regardless, both of our experiences are a reminder that the core connectivity paradigm of Instagram — the basic model of how users connect with each other — encourages users to follow the activities of a personally curated group of people.
That’s not TikTok’s connectivity paradigm. For those who haven’t spent much time comparing TikTok’s connectivity paradigm with Instagram’s — which, let’s face it, is most people who aren’t academic social media nerds like me — TikTok doesn’t emphasize following people. Yes, TikTok does let users follow people. And, yes, lots of users do follow people. But, thanks to TikTok’s content-choosing algorithm, users can have a fully immersive TikTok experience without ever following another account.
To fully appreciate the difference, think back to the moment you created your Instagram account. The first thing you were asked to do was choose other accounts to follow. Without taking that step, you probably wouldn’t have gotten any value from Instagram, and you wouldn’t have become an active user.
These differing connectivity paradigms mean Instagram and TikTok provide different types of value. Instagram primarily provides value to users by allowing them to continuously “follow” the lives of other people they care about. In contrast, TikTok provides value to users by showing entertaining content. The user’s relationship with content creators is secondary.
Returning to my student’s comment about Instagram being dead, she was never saying the value she got from Instagram was being replaced by TikTok. She was lamenting that the value she extracts from Instagram isn’t as accessible during the pandemic, whereas TikTok is useful because it provides value in a different way.
If anything, the fact that the pandemic is causing a surge in TikTok growth highlights the differences between the two platforms. If Instagram and TikTok were serving the same roles in their users’ lives, both platforms would be similarly impacted by COVID-19. But they aren’t. Instead, TikTok is surging and Instagram usage might be, for certain cohorts of users, slightly declining.
We should even be suspicious of that claim. How much of TikTok’s surge is really just a byproduct of some people having more time for social media? Maybe Instagram continues having the same amount of content it always had, but its users, with more time during the pandemic, are able to “reach the end” more often?
For these reasons, I don’t believe Instagram needs to be overly concerned about TikTok eating its market share. However, I do see TikTok’s surge threatening another platform: YouTube.
While YouTube, like TikTok, does allow people to follow other accounts (“subscribing” in YouTube parlance), most YouTube users don’t subscribe to many accounts. Instead, YouTube users, like TikTok users, seem less concerned with whose content they’re watching and more concerned with the entertainment and/or information they extract from watching it. These parallel usage patterns suggest users derive similar value from TikTok and YouTube. However, TikTok has one big advantage: time constraints. TikTok videos can’t run longer than 60 seconds.
Spend an hour on TikTok and an hour on YouTube, and you’ll quickly feel the difference. An hour on TikTok flies by as you constantly jump from one video to the next, each one perfectly curated by an algorithm that seems to know you better than you know yourself. On YouTube, in that same hour you might get through five or six videos. Plus, you probably invested part of your hour on videos that were dull and couldn’t keep your interest past the first couple minutes.
After a comparison of the two platforms, you’ll start to see the core problem with YouTube videos: they’re bloated. And the biggest culprits aren’t the vlogs and TED Talks and webisodes because most people are comfortable spending more time viewing content with a compelling narrative arc. Instead, the real bloat on YouTube shows up in the “how to” videos.
The content that teaches people how to do things — from editing pictures in photoshop to cooking new foods to fixing leaky faucets — is often much longer than it needs to be because YouTube videos can last 15 minutes (or, in some cases, up to 12 hours). This longer time limit enables less thoughtful editing and more extraneous “fluff” in each video.
For example, let’s say you want to fix a door in your house that’s rubbing against the top of it’s frame. Since 2008, 1.4 million people have skipped their way through a 7.5 minute clunker of a video. In contrast, in just two months on TikTok, 3.2 million people have been taught the same thing in less than 60 seconds. Just as importantly, many of those people didn’t realize they needed to know the information, but TikTok’s algorithm thought otherwise.
For the record, my wife was one of those 3.2 million people, and she forwarded the TikTok to me so I could use it to fix one of our doors. Thanks for ruining half my Sunday, TikTok.
In a way, the relationship between YouTube “how to” videos and TikTok “how to” videos reminds me of the old quote from (debatably) Mark Twain:
“I apologize for such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
Twain is reminding us that being lengthy is easier than being concise because editing our thoughts is more difficult than recording them. But users value brevity. TikTok forces it. YouTube doesn’t. Unless YouTube changes something soon, I suspect we’re going to start seeing a lot more “how to” videos posted on TikTok. As TikTok’s collection of “how to” videos grow, it’ll ultimately help drive more user growth than the pandemic, and the social media platform that’s going to suffer most from TikTok’s growth won’t be Instagram.
