Imagine Turning TikToks Into Insight

“What on earth have you done?”, Karen (a member of our team), aghast, asks her teenage daughter.

She’s standing there holding up a pair of expensive jeans which are now, in Karen’s mind, completely ruined.

“I’ve bleached them”, she replies “I saw it on TikTok”.

Social data is often overlooked and misunderstood. None so much as TikTok.

For us *cough* more seasoned researchers it can feel like Alice falling into wonderland.

But it is a mistake to underestimate its power. Its reach. Its influence.

It can drive growth worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The incredible rise of CeraVe from Spring 2020 owes a lot of its success to TikTok.

Imagine if you could harness that power.

But you can’t automate your way to insight about TikTok.

It’s got no API, so the listening tools have no solution.

It’s video, which makes it immune to the efforts of most automated tools.

But there is a way.

How do you find insight in TikTok?

We’ve spent the last few years hard at work in the lab, creating a methodology for taming TikTok. What we’ve learned is that it’s important to take the following factors into account.

• Purpose: As with all research, the better the question, the better the answer. Spend time defining the business case and exploring how TikTok can help (it won’t always be the right option).
• Access: The lack of API means you need to get manual. Depending on the size of your project, you’ll need some help (who’ll need training and guidance). Time to get out your smartphone (or find the right partner).
• Ethics: The ability to access TikTok has raced ahead of any consensus on ethics. Our view is to use content that wants to be found (through the use of #s), report in aggregate, and obscure personal information. You will need to think about and define your position.
• Focus: You’ll then need to identify which #s best speak to your topic and how broadly these are spread. This will help you choose where to focus.
• Immersion: Now it’s time to get watching. Spend time watching TikToks. Let it all wash over you. You’ll soon start to notice patterns and commonalities. Use these to develop a framework for interpreting what you’re seeing.
• Codifying: Then it’s time to apply your framework to a sample of TikToks to interpret their meaning. How many should you look at? It depends on the importance of the work and how robust the results need to be. We’d suggest several hundred as a minimum.
• Analysis: The coding will give you a framework to start building your story and help identify areas for further analysis. Return to rich TikToks to help build out your thinking and help you understand what’s really going on.
• Reporting: Think about how you can build stories out of the glimpses into people’s lives that they’re giving you on TikTok, and how brands might be able to become part of that conversation in a meaningful way.

This may sound like a lot of work (and it is), but no more so than other forms of research. Develop the right in-house capability (or, again, find the right partner).

It’s worth it.

TikTok is a unique source of data with huge potential for helping you understand what your customers really want.

Just as in the case of Karen’s daughter and her bleached jeans, TikTok can wield a huge influence on real-world behaviours.

As a research industry, we need to start taking TikTok and other social data more seriously.

The over-reliance on social listening means the true value of social data is being overlooked and misunderstood.

Social should be giving you new insights into what your customers really want, in a way that helps you create action.

If it’s not, maybe it’s time to leave the dashboards behind and try something a little more unconventional?