TikTok: How I've Been Using It [INFOGRAPHIC] [LIST]
What I've learned about TikTok so far:
It's a video medium
It's very heavy on collaboration
It's exploding (see infographic)
Its audience is highly engaged (68% watched someone else’s video, and 55% uploaded their own)
Its audience is young, and on the verge of having massive spending power (41% are between 16-25)
I heard about it on Gary Vaynerchuk’s podcast, and he’s pushing heavily on it right now. The guy has been right about a lot so far, so I decided to hop on.
After spending a few hours watching the videos that have been posted, I found that the vast majority that were showing in my feed were:
Lip syncing
Cosplay
Comedic
Duets (more on that in a second)
There wasn’t a lot of “original” content on there, in that most of the people were using audio from trending songs or from clips of movies and TV shows (both live action and animated) and putting their unique spin on them with their pantomime.
On each video, in the lower right-hand corner, there is a button that lets you see who originally posted the audio, and this same screen lets you see all of the people who have used the audio in their videos.
Duets is a feature that makes TikTok rather unique in social media: one creator can post a video of them lip syncing to one half of a conversation or a song. Then another creator can “duet” them, lip syncing the other side of the conversation, and the video will now show them side-by-side. It’s an interesting space to see how people are collaborating with each other to create some entertaining videos.
I’ve also noticed something…it doesn’t appear that there are a lot of voice actors on there. Maybe I’m just not seeing them, but as of an hour ago, I only saw a handful, maybe five, posting original content. It seems like a great opportunity to not only practice character voices, writing, and improv (I’ve been improving most of my stuff on there) but to build a little bit of a following. I can imagine that would make an actor attractive to potential directors if they know that the actor can push content to their audience.
Here's what I've been doing:
Recording sound and video. I go into my booth and record two characters having an interaction. I run my cell phone video at the same time, and sync it up in post so that the video is now matched with the higher-quality audio.
Produce a 15-30 second video. “Long” format, which on TikTok is 60 seconds, is not the norm, so I edit the conversation down so it’s a tight 15-30 seconds. I’ll reverse the video for one side of the conversation to create something more visually interesting.
Add captions. This is something that really doesn’t come up in the VO world. There is a community of Deaf and hard-of-hearing people on TikTok, and there aren’t a lot of people outside of that community doing things to make their videos accessible. I started adding captions in fonts that match the tone of the character. It also helps with other social sites where I can upload the video, but it may start playing on mute.
Tag people. I have a list of people I follow on there, and some notes on each for the types of videos they post, and the types of characters that they cosplay. (I tend to follow a lot of demonic cosplayers, it turns out.) When I post a video that I think they may like, I’ll tag them in it and also use the hashtag #duetthis and an invitation for them to use the audio. This will help spread the video around more, getting more eyes on it.
These are just my initial reactions and thoughts after a week on the platform. I’m sure I’ll have more in the future.
If you are interested in collaborating on some projects for TikTok as a way of building content and building followers/engagement, please reach out to me.
Citations:
Mohsin, M. (2019). 10 TikTok Statistics That You Need to Know in 2019 [Infographic]. [online] Oberlo. Available at: https://www.oberlo.com/blog/tiktok-statistics [Accessed 11 Sep. 2019].