Welcome Social Saturday

So here's the deal, this isn't going to be a professional style blog by any means so if you were looking for that... sorry bud. Now just a little information about me, I'm a college student currently living in the COVID-19 pandemic. During my immense boredom after high school was canceled an application started to take off that I literally couldn't even bring myself to care about at first. Now that application is making people famous for sometimes absolutely no apparent reason and has almost 700 million active users. Can you guess which app I'm talking about? If you didn't guess TikTok that's okay, you're probably just not Gen Z and have an actual life.

Nonetheless TikTok and Gen Z, well they're popping, and when I say popping I mean absolutely dominating. Now TikTok at first glance looks like a mix of out of the ordinary dances and odd challenges, but if you look at it a bit more deeply and keep up with its constant news headlines you'd see how much influence the app has on social development of Gen Z. You see a 16-year-old girl become the most famous people on the internet and a Trump rally get sold out by non-Trump supporters to mess with the guy just because a group of kids on TikTok wanted it to happen. That's the strength and beauty of the algorithm, it can make normal people ridiculously famous and have a direct impact on politics.

It's drastically easier to blow up on TikTok than any other social media platform by a long shot, if you ask around enough I'm sure you can find someone who's in your inner circle who is "TikTok famous". Now slow down though just because you've got a hundred thousand followers on TikTok doesn't mean you've made it. If you want to actually monetize your following then you have to either have to give a cut to a talent manager or reach out to tons of brands trying to get a promotion deal. Unless you're a "hype house" TikToker (we'll get into that in a later post) then you're probably making a lot less than you'd think you should with hundreds of thousands of followers. Understand, on this platform you don't even have to have a real skill you can simply just exist and do a dance that took you 30 seconds.

This isn't me ripping on TikTok influencers by any means, you're the future of the growing 15 billion dollars influencer-marketing industry after all but let's be honest, it doesn't take that much to gain a following of a couple thousand on the platform. TikTok deserves a lot of credit for establishing such a unique and diverse consumer base, everything and anyone can see growth on the platform through consistent posting and posting at the right time. Not only can anything blow up but people aren't afraid to be themselves on the platform creating a more organic feel to it, people are more likely to express themselves for who they are. What's that Instagram? Mad you're losing your users whom you've caused to have eating disorders and unrealistic body images? Just kidding, Instagram is doing fine because they've already copied TikTok's short video sharing feature. Figures.

Hope you all enjoyed my first take or didn't.