TikTok speeds up with eCommerce

We have been talking about this for years. Social platforms started monetization process through advertising.

As soon as they reached critical masses of relevant users, they started showing ads to those audience. And that is how Facebook Ads, Pinterest or Twitter's advertising platform came about.

That stage is fully over and established. So, the next step is, necessarily, to sell within the platform itself natively.

Facebook incorporated catalogs with eCommerce product feeds and started allowing them to be tagged in posts, both on Facebook itself and Instagram, via shoppable tags.

Clearly, the goal is to be able to offer a social shopping experience and virtually without the intervention of the eCommerce itself. This tactic is ideal for strengthening strategies such as influencer marketing, making impulse purchases grow.

Few anticipated how far what was originally called Musical.ly could go. A rather innocent-looking network that did not seem to be a threat to the big totems.

The rest of networks were well established when it changed its name (and strategy) to become TikTok. Even some marketing specialists were more aware of platforms like Snapchat, which in the long run have turned out to be less interesting.

Today, it has 732 million unique users, which puts it in a more than honorable seventh position in the list of most used networks (and that is without talking about engagement, which is its real strong point).

And despite this, it is true that it is still sometimes seen as a network for Generation Z; but it has proven to be a much tougher challenger to the throne of the networks than could be imagined.

Having entered the fray later, it has had to accelerate in some respects to reach the monetization we are talking about.

The first thing has been to increase its base user. To this end, it has implemented policies such as paying the most relevant content creators (in the style of YouTube), creating a referral system by also paying users who attract their contacts to sign up, or carrying out major sponsorships that give it visibility in multiple segments, such as the last European Football Championship.

Note: behind this there is no question of vanity or of wanting to "depose" a specific network. A business strategy lies behind it .

In principle, we see how the accounts attached to the program will have an additional tab called directly eCommerce. On it, creators and brands will be able to make their catalog available to the audience. Below you can see in this screenshot how it works exactly with the example of one of the first brands to use it: Kylie Cosmetics.

This is relevant, but not as relevant as another of the possibilities it offers and which is so much in demand: including links in the videos themselves. Currently, this option is only available to advertisers, but not organically as is being proposed.

 

So, the main added value with respect to the current strategy is this, which is by no means negligible, but is more important from the point of view of the overall strategy of the platform than for the agreement itself.

Having said all this, it is important to remember that this is a pilot in the United States and that it is not yet fully developed for all users globally. That is why it is advisable to look at it very carefully but with a certain perspective, and we will see how the strategy evolves.

For the moment, as we said, we have the option of carrying out advertising campaigns through its platform, which are quite effective for some products and niches. It is also worth exploring the possibilities of streaming using influencers, which is a trend that comes from China (like TikTok itself) and is becoming increasingly popular.

In fact, you can sell on TikTok without necessarily doing so through a link in your account posts, and we anticipate that it is not going to stop here in terms of innovations in that regard. For now, you can take a look at the main TikTok marketing insights we have analyzed on our blog.