To beat TikTok, other social media giants simply have to rethink their entire reason for being…
A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me, “Why can’t Stories and Reels be cool and hip culture factories like TikTok?”
Because of the limited space, I replied, “TikTok starts with people you don’t know. Reels and Shorts are based in apps that put ‘follow’ first and ‘discover’ second.” Since then, I’ve been mulling what I meant and dying to expand on the thought. Now y’all are the audience for that expansion:
A good head start
While there were short video format apps before TikTok (Vine and Muscia.ly, the site ByteDance bought to help launch TikTok outside China), none of them benefitted from TikTok’s tuning (Douyin had already learned much from it’s 100 million users) nor did they come of age during a global pandemic. Couple that with Warner Brothers Music deals and pretty lax copyright enforcement (at least at the beginning), and you have an easy-to-use platform enabling people to goof around with purpose at the exact moment they have time to kill and a burning drive to battle loneliness via online connection.
Discovery engine
While all social media exists to sell things, TikTok’s intent is fundamentally different than the engines that house Shorts and Reels. TikTok was conceived as a discovery engine. When you log into TikTok the first time, you run through a brief gauntlet of answering “what do you like?” questions and then land on the For You page. There, TikTok serves up an endless buffet of new and extremely palatable videos algorithmically tuned to your self-described tastes. Then the machine keeps careful track of how long you watch each subsequent video, notes whether or not you were lying about your taste at the outset, and then fine-tunes itself over each of your watch sessions. Find someone you want to follow? Great. You follow them, and they get shunted off to a page you likely won’t ever visit. For You is new, novel and surprising–everything the familiar follows isn’t, and designed specifically to boost your reward center. You know what you’re going to get in the “Following” section. The For You page–default whenever you launch the app–is a constant surprise party with pre-sliced cake.
Facebook (The child that begat the parent, Meta) was created to generate users. Its exclusive pedigree (first customers were limited to Harvard.edu email addresses) meant that people wanted to be included. But to be included, you had to know someone on the inside. That ethos continued to Instagram, where you get a mix of friends and follows all on the same page. Neither of these serves up anything new or interesting.
I’ve often said that Facebook should replace its “people you may know” section with “people you should know” wherein it recommends people who may help some aspect of your life. Instead, your work-friend’s nephew who recently made a baking soda volcano sits in that “..you may know” section like an unwelcome toad.
The two platforms (FB and Insta) are also just plain dumb. With as much as Facebook and Instagram know about me, you’d think they’d offer up reel suggestions that are more than AI waifs unable to figure out sliding doors or “Top 3 AI prompts to make better AI prompts” videos. Just show me Lance Mountain all day, ok? Let’s start from there and see what happens.
Why are you here?
Not unrelated to “a good head start” is purpose. People aren’t going to Facebook to watch videos, nor are they going to Instagram to watch videos. And yes, people go to YouTube to watch videos, but they go there to watch long-form videos about a specific subject and, again, it’s easier to get to what you’ve subscribed to (Following) than what you haven’t (For You). YouTube actually does a better job than either Facebook or Instagram in offering up short video content recommendations, but I’m not there to watch those. I’m on YouTube to spend 2 hours with the guys from The Nine Club and learn about some behind-the-scenes antics of Flip’s last tour (see Lance Mountain, above).
I think if YouTube had created a stand-alone platform for its short video content, it could have been a real contender. As it stands, YouTube shorts are still an obvious after-thought, nestled in there between rows of long-form videos. Don’t interrupt me when I’m on the hunt for “10-hour lo-fi study time beats for work and concentration”, ok?
Authenticity
Which brings me back around to the whole copycat thing. As we’re being served up content that’s more and more polished, we’re hungry for authenticity. Part of Meta platforms’ and YouTube’s inability to snag our attention with their short video formats lies with their obvious copycat status. TikTok did a thing, it was successful, and then the remaining major platforms raced into the space. We can feel their envy in our bones, and we can experience their rush to market in the poor experiences they offer up.
The obligatory call for comments
So what do y’all think? Could YouTube have put up a solid competitor? How should Facebook totally retool itself to step in and fill a void that’s probably coming sooner rather than later? What’s the app you’d make to reach a billion dollars?
