TikTok’s exponential growth worldwide

Rising from China, South East Asia, Japan, India to the United States

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Have you wondered how TikTok became the №1 downloaded app? Its biggest market is China, India, and the United States.

TikTok saw exponential growth in just two years.

TikTok is currently available in 150 countries and 75 languages. When it entered the Japan market in August 2017, It only took only three months and a team of five to make the app the most downloaded in the Apple store.

Its exponential growth is no coincidence as its worldwide expansion placed a heavy emphasis on serving intuitive features and localized content.

Start browsing in two clicks. No Signups required.

For those who haven’t used TikTok, this is how easy it is to start browsing content.

This feature has inspired a wave of updates. Many apps have copycat this feed of swipes + see a full-screen video as the new way for users to discover new content.

Ultimate Guitar: Chords & Tabs, a coliseum of guitar tabs with 360K downloads in the Google Play Store, has recently introduced this content discovery feature for user-generated guitar playing videos. Since then, the app has become extremely laggy and attracted many negative reviews (Hi, I do hope you fix this soon! I’m a paid subscriber.) The upside is that it’s made finding tab demo a lot easier.

Ultimate Guitar browsing experience: the resemblance is uncanny.

Crack open a new market with local influencers. And money.

TikTok gets what ignites engagements on social media.

The efforts TikTok has made to localize the content are tremendous. The content has proved its value for growth.

Drawing in local celebrities and influencers is a key component of TikTok’s launch in a new market. It’s a smart move as the celebrities have the talents for quality video production, which would set the tone for future content creation.

• In Japan, Kinoshita Yukina, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, E-Girls, and YouTuber Fichers were all invited to be the early users of TikTok.
• In Indonesia, TikTok invited more than 100 celebrities and bloggers to the launch to inspire networking and collaboration.
• In Thailand, TikTok introduced new stickers for the Songkran Festival. These stickers were widely used before and after the festival.

The type of trendy content is different in each country. TikTok has made a deliberate effort to segment the user content to its own country so it doesn’t affect new users’ experiences of consuming and creating content that is relatable and intimate to them.

• TikTok Japan: https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktokjapan
• TikTok Indonesia: https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktokthailand
• TikTok Australia: https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok_australia

However, apart from fighting the battle of getting accepted culturally, legal and political factors are often the biggest stoppers for growth. TikTok is currently banned from India as some of its content promoted pornographic content and violent act.

It remains a challenge to TikTok for, to what extent, it should moderate the user-generated content. Nonetheless, born as a China-originated social app, TikTok would face no shortage of being questioned for issues around privacy, censorship, and ethics. It has no other choices but to be versatile to the local market to beats it’s competitors.

Summary

Not every day a China-born social media goes viral in Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and worldwide. You’re witnessing a great example for overseas brands with a vision for the global market, including the United States, a competitive yet high-margin market.

It has certainly ridden on event-driven growth. Many people have also shared TikTok managed to take their minds off the pandemic. The TikTok challenges have inspired creativity and entertainment for days staying at home.

TikTok’s growth will continue for it’s done many right things from localization to putting its users’ interest in the first place. It’s going to be a great new avenue for FMCG brands and eCommerce who are thinking to target the age group between 14 and 25, Generation Z.

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