TikTok ... TikTok ... TikTok

This article is about the TikTok and future of social media. Is the TikTok deal going to be any threat to Facebook group ? Is TikTok going to shape up the social platforms dominance any differently than what it is currently? We will see in below article.

Please note we won't discuss the internals of TikTok deal with Oracle/Walmart. Oracle has enough cash and strong desire to grow its cloud business. It can do anything to make Oracle cloud one of the top 3. This deal for Oracle more in terms of cloud and for Walmart it means more in terms of dominating advertisement platforms.

TikTok is more or less like Vine. If you don't remember what it is, its short video social media. You can follow friends and celebrities and make your own videos. Vine was doing almost the same thing except it stuck to 6 seconds video for long time before making the duration longer. It came at a time may be people were not into visual. TikTok started getting popular in China around the same time Vine slowed down in US. Timing makes all the difference.

TikTok definitely attracted huge population all over the world at this point. 800 million active users world wide. 41% of TikTok users are between 16 and 24. 30% of this app usage is in India. Definitely it has some good stats under its belt. But if you see the bigger picture, if an app is banned for sometime users will slowly migrate. Active Users are like beating heart of social media.

Top 3 Internet usage happens in China, India and USA, in the same order. If you see the current state company is already banned in India. Its close to loose 30% of its users all over the world. Eventually it will hit end of road in USA. That leaves it more like country specific app, which can easily die down over time. India and USA is where the most of the TIKTOK downloads are happening. Even if the bans are revoked by that time users might have already migrated. In that sense it looks more like Microsoft and Nokia deal to me.

Trust is the most important thing for any social media app. That's where Facebook struggled but able to weather the storm. TikTok has lot of bad PR when compared to any social media. This will hit the brand even after the new deal. TikTok retention rate is way below other social media platforms. may be because of routine content.

I don't see any threat because of the TikTok deal to Facebook group. Because Facebook has Images, text, news, groups, retail, chat, Group messaging, simulated realty and more. TikTok has only Video and it's difficult to keep active users based on one type of content. This is my opinion, I could be wrong, let's see the future.

Resource:

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/#:~:text=India%20still%20leads%20by%20some,are%20covered%20by%20these%20stats.

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