Driving appeal, growth and advocacy on TikTok

Business challenge

TikTok was growing exponentially, with its on-platform creators heavily impacting its appeal. Thus, creator satisfaction was increasingly becoming a key factor in determining the long-term vitality and use of the app.

To continue this growth, TikTok wanted a deeper understanding of their user’s implicit and explicit feelings to help build app advocacy, develop the right product features, and capture diversified content interests in the UK and Germany.

Human insights

Instead of launching nation-wide creator surveys, we recommended being as close as possible to the creators, adopting a human-first and interpersonal approach.

We spoke directly with over 75 creators; each representing a set of creator content pools in the UK and DE, through one-on-one discussions that tapped into both conscious and subconscious behaviour. We used tonal analysis to measure the emotional intensity and implicit responses of these recordings.

Our research showed that depending on the creators level of reach (followers), the importance of each topic differed and so the creators were split into two core categories: Top vs Emerging creators.

Actionable outputs

Our research into both implicit and explicit behaviour allowed us to get a deeper understanding of TikTok’s creators and users to develop their monetisation strategy.

We were able to identify issues key to TikTok creators and by splitting the creators into 2 groups, we were able to illustrate the value of emerging creators to maintain the apps relevancy and growth, as well as being vital for disruptive platform experimentation.

Our work recommended product features which should be improved, which fed into a focus on ‘Learn on TikTok’ and launched as a product feature.