The 2 week ban on the ByteDance owned TikTok was recently uplifted with the Chinese video making and sharing app making its comeback in the digi world.
With over 120 million Indian users on its platform, the company began showcasing its advertising products to Indian brands last November, and among the first to leverage the platform was online retailer Voonik, which began advertising in end March.
Others using the platform are beverage major Pepsi, and a host of ecommerce sites such as Myntra, ShopClues, Snapdeal, edtech startups like Cuemath, Masterclass, video-on-demand companies Voot and Viu, delivery app Dunzo, dating app TanTan, social commerce platform Meesho and short-video social network app Vigo.
“TikTok has users creating great content even from the most remote towns in the country. For marketers, this translates into easily reaching an audience that was harder to tap otherwise,” said Sachin Sharma, head of ad sales and customer support for ByteDance India.
The Chinese major which is currently the world’s most valued startup with an estimated worth of $75 billion has launched advertising formats ‘Brand Takeover’ that allows fullscreen vertical display and ‘In-feed Native Video’ that allows for more immersive and interactive format.
According to Harish Bijoor, a brand consultant,“The application is a potent combination of audio, video, music and irreverence,” who also believes that,“brands don’t care about controversies, they only care about eyeballs”.
Bijoor estimates that users in rural India use TikTok for an average of 106 minutes every day, whereas in urban India usage is for about 7.5 minutes.
“Engagement on TikTok is higher than Facebook, Instagram and Twitter,” Bijoor said.
Vidit Aatrey, founder of social commerce platform Meesho, said TikTok has good distribution in tier-II and tier-III cities, while fashion portal Voonik is finding that its target audience of 18-35 year-olds matches with the user base at TikTok.
“Voonik and TikTok have a coinciding target audience. It made right sense for Voonik to target TikTok’s young and super-active crowd, which follows fast fashion,” said Prem Suganth VT, associate director at Voonik.
Tiger Global-backed e-commerce platform ShopClues said it is currently running a small pilot on TikTok. The company considers social media as a key channel for customer acquisition, and TikTok has presented itself as a new and large source, having opened the platform for advertising recently.
“The impact remains to be seen only when we increase our advertising on the platform,” said Rajat Girdhar, head of marketing at ShopClues.
Meanwhile TikTok has ensured to follow the orders of Madras High Court by adding a bunch of new security features to its app. The new update of the app is now available on PlayStore and AppStore.
