While Tiktok may have started out as a platform for the new generation to lip sync to songs and share with their friends, it’s heavily evolved in the past two years. When 2020 turned all of our lives upside down, an influx of new users flocked to the social media site and it hasn’t been the same since. When the pandemic hit, Tiktok was widely considered a joke. In an unlikely turn of events, it’s gone from a dance choreography app to a serious threat to the biggest search engine in the world.
Read our previous blog teaching TikTok SEO
“A Beginners Guide to TikTok SEO”
TikTok has become the go-to app for young people and creators on the internet. However, the video-sharing platform is much more than a content pumping machine. It’s beginning to seriously compete with Google in terms of daily searches, and it’s alarming news for people at Google. Teens and early twenties prefer the ease and convenience of Tiktok, preferring to be able to see a video of what they’re looking for rather than a photo or article on Google.
You can now find Gen Xers and Millennials on the platform, but we have to credit Gen Z for this pivotal cultural shift from photo to video content. Once upon a time, you would have gone to Instagram to find new bars, restaurants, and coffee shops, but photos can only show you so much. Tiktok started the trend of showing every single part of the experience, from entrance, to the dining table, to exiting a location, and now it’s being used more frequently than google to find new places to visit.
Google may allow you to see a restaurant’s reviews and a couple photos here and there, but Tiktok shows you the food being ordered, oftentimes prepared, served, and eaten. It adds a personal flair that cannot be replicated, so it makes sense that around 65% of people in a recent survey said they visited a location after seeing it on the app. Here’s an example of a Tiktok creator driving traffic to restaurants via sharing their experience:
@loveandloathingla New spot alert: The Hideaway in Beverly Hills 💕🥩🍹 #lafoodie #laeats #larestaurants #losangelesrestaurants #losangeles #beverlyhills #losangeleslife #dinela ♬ Why Are There Boundaries – FKJ
This creator not only shows a new restaurant in Beverly Hills, but she shows herself and her friends enjoying the location. She displays what the dress code is, comments on each different space in the restaurant, features what she and her friends ordered, and shows all of the things that make this restaurant unique in her opinion. After watching the video, anyone would be more tempted to visit The Hideaway!
With an average of 650,000 new users joining Tiktok every day, this trend towards users looking to Tiktok over google is only going to grow. And if you’re a restaurant or cafe owner reading this, it’s high time to start your influencer marketing strategy! Tiktok is putting businesses on the map, changing people’s lives one viral video at a time.
