Mass media are becoming 'tiktokers'

TikTok is constantly increasing its flow of users and, with each passing day, is working on new ideas to attract and captivate new audiences. Although it began as a social network for sharing short videos, it is currently mutating into a more communicative media, and many young people are already opting to get news information through the platform.

TikTok's beginnings were linked to funny and musical content, offering intuitive tools to create videos that could then be shared on other networks. As time went by, it gained the loyalty of more users, and today it has a much larger community around the world.

According to a Reuters Institute study, 15% of 18-24-year-olds, use TikTok for information. Among young adults between the ages of 25 and 34, 10%. And in the 35-44 age range, 7%.

Faced with rapid growth, the brand's executive management allowed for longer videos and live broadcasts, two features that bring TikTok closer to the world of news media. In addition, phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine intensified this trend.

The publishers' bet

According to a Reuters Institute report, news circulating on social networks is still overwhelmingly generated and disseminated by influencers and activists rather than official sources. In addition, it also determined that TikTok does not have a good level of credibility, especially in the United States.

However, some forward-thinking publishers have already begun to think about how to move their work to the Chinese-based platform, especially since it has more than one billion daily active users and was the most downloaded in the world since the beginning of 2020.

Out of a total of 44 countries surveyed, in almost half (49%) of the major media outlets update their TikTok accounts daily. Publishers in the United States, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, Indonesia, Argentina, and Brazil are the ones that most included the platform in their social media strategies.

In this sense, there is a difference in the levels of inclusion of the application between alternative media and traditional news companies. For example, NowThis News, a progressive news organization focused on social networks that were founded only in 2012, has 5,700,000 followers, while CNN has 1,200,000 and The Washington Post, has 1,500,000.

TikTok's biggest obstacle

TikTok's main challenges to completing its entry into the communication world are not different from those of other social networks in the past: the fear that the brevity of the content will lead to trivializing important news, the difficulties in monetizing the content, being a fertile field for fake news, among others.

However, it will be the first social network to have to deal directly with federal governments, such as that of the United States, due to various suspicions of spying on users. For instance, Congress has already announced that it will remove the popular application from all its electronic devices.

Thus, if it manages to overcome this important opposition, it will be inevitable that, sooner or later, the platform will become a strong player in terms of the dissemination of news and information.