While passing-time or entertainment is the most common answer to why people want to continue using TikTok, there are also some other answers that I received. Coronavirus lockdown bored people to an extent that many of them have downloaded TikTok only for entertainment purposes.
Some said that they feel more close/connected to home, when they see TikTok videos from their country.
So, TikTok not only heals boredom and helps people enjoy themselves, have some laugh and lighten up — but it also helps them feel closer to home.
This survey cannot be said to be equal to a proper user-research for many reasons, but this was more of a fun-project that I did for myself, just to understand the mindset of different people.
Who would have thought that TikTok might make someone feel closer to home? So, unless you talk to people, you’ll never get to understand different mindsets.
The final analysis, about Generation-Z mindset is not just an outcome of some answers from these stories, but also after a discussion with some of my cousins and young followers on Instagram, that helped me understand the following things —
FoMo and Community: Generation-Z want to be a part of their own social community, their group, circle of friends, their school and college profiles. They don’t want to miss out on cool content or a viral video about the coolest girl of college, that’s why they want to be a part of TikTok. Some participants said that cool girls of college post videos on TikTok that they can’t miss out on, so they’re there! They follow them to keep themselves updated with what everyone in their college is posting.
Less time investment: Users don’t really need to remember what they saw in the previous episode, or watch things in continuation to build a story. They can skip from one video to the other real-quick, and not miss out on anything! The time-investment is low, the attention-span requirement is low, TikTok doesn’t need it’s users to be attentive all the time, not even for five minutes! That’s what people want. That’s what Generation-Z want.
TikTok is easy and fun: There is no debate in the fact that a higher percentage of people use TikTok for entertainment purposes only. There are more content viewers than content creators, as per the 1% rule for internet culture that states that there are only 1% content creators as compared to 100% of the content consumers (same is the case with every product, may it be Quora or Medium or Reddit or even social media).
And as per almost all the users who actively create content on TikTok, on-boarding and creating content is fairly easy, which makes the platform even more popular and engaging. The moment you introduce something difficult, or something where users have to learn something new, you are automatically driving a lot of user-traffic away.
Online Recognition: While online recognition or fame is not something new, but every new platform has scope for those people who couldn’t get that recognition on other platforms! If you try to become famous on YouTube in 2020, it’s harder than being famous when it had just started. Because now, there are millions of channels and billions of videos on YouTube. People have access to every sort of content, so unless you create something absolutely kickass, there are low chances that you’d make it big!
Collecting subscribers on YouTube is harder than collecting likes and views on TikTok. Although there is no comparison between YouTube and TikTok or the user-bases of the two platforms, but there are people who would rather create content on TikTok than YouTube.