In “young people” news, WWE (World Wide Entertainment) has started a channel on TikTok. They will begin with making “entrance themes” available for users to create and share expressive content in their own TikToks, as reported in Variety.
Hold Up - What Is TikTok and What Is An “Entrance Theme”?
TikTok is a video-sharing app that kids use. According to TikTok, about 60% of TikTok’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the U.S. are between ages 16 and 24. TikTok started as a video sharing app created by ByteDance, which is largely described by U.S. media as a “Chinese Internet company” (though the website’s home page shows primarily white people and one brown person at a conference table working on laptops).
TikTok then bought a social music video creating/sharing app called Musical.ly, which according to Slate was equally as popular and was all the rage with musicians and regular people who would use the music to make videos. TikTok also favored comedy and lifestyle content, so the name Musical.ly got dropped, and music got heavily absorbed into TikTok. You can read all about it here at this Guide To TikTok at Slate.
According to the Variety article who attributes TikTok, “Amoung U.S. users in 2019, the most popular music artists on the platform were Lil Nas X, Mariah Carey, Lizzo, Stunna Girl, Blanco Brown, Y2k & Bbno$, Kyle, Luh Kel, Billie Eilish and Ashnikko. The top celebrities on TikTok were Will Smith, Miley Cyrus, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Howie Mandel, Terry Crews and Selena Gomez.”
Back to “entrance themes.” That’s a WWE thing, where the wrestling characters have videos that illustrate the base and depths of their characters. Vice did a roundup of the 25 Best Entrance Songs Of All Time in 2018, which gives you an idea of what content will now be easily accessed by kids to create their own expressions.
What Does This All Mean?
For businesses and brands, this simply means that TikTok is getting ever more solid as a social media platform that is in your regular deck of social media apps to create content for and/or be aware of what other brands are creating there.
Advertising is definitely available on the platform and is reaching people with well-crafted content. If you are a musician, it seems like TikTok is solidly a place you want to be and have your music on. TikTok is not limited to music, however, and can include humor, challenges, experiments, how-to’s (the weirder the better), and other oddities. The content is at best imperfect, and extremely raw - meaning you don’t need to make slick, high-polished/produced videos to upload here. The end-game is all about what kind of emotion you create for the person who just scrolled through the dozens of videos and absorbed yours.
At the end of the day, creating content for TikTok would be connected to brand loyalty for you, and falls into the category of “what kind of emotional output are you putting out there?” The answer to that question would determine if you want to start investing your time and energy into making and publishing TikTok videos. And if you wanted to pursue/pitch influencers to incorporate your brand into their videos.
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