With 1 billion users and counting, TikTok’s popularity and influence grows with each day. With the holiday season just around the corner, marketers and brands are now pondering how they can utilize the platform to maximize their festive gains.
While TikTok may still be lacking in terms of total eCommerce integration, especially when compared to the optimized revenue models of platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, it does excel at influencing user action; a major element of purchase behavior. This is exactly what TikTok’s new report highlights. TikTok, in partnership with WARC and Publicis Groupe, analyzed the concept of ‘Community Commerce’ and discusses why it’s central with regards to marketing appeal.
You can access the full, 37-page report here.
Outlining the process of ‘Community Commerce’, TikTok explains:
“Community commerce specifcally speaks to the notion of entertaining, compelling content that just happens to feature brands. It is creator-driven, word-of-mouth marketing that has taken over the TikTok platform and injects a new opportunity into content creation on social that is more authentic to its environment.”
What they’re basically trying to say is that TikTok branded content, made in conjunction with creators and through the help of the entire TikTok community, can help build stronger bonds, leading to better brand establishment and reception.
On its own, brand establishment and desirability is not always easy to get right, especially when starting out. However, with the aid of creators who are well acquainted with the platform, this ‘Community Commerce’ approach can drive significant results. This observation is supported by several statistics found in the report.
One particular statistic from the report is taken from a sample of 2,230 consumers across 11 markets (countries). This observation provided moe insight as to the role of social media platforms and what role they play with respect to product discovery and purchase. As shown in the data, social platforms do seem to influence purchase behavior and that consumers are increasingly open to buying directly from social platforms.
This possibly explains why all platforms are now working to incorporate in-stream or live-shopping. Pandemic-led eCommerce rise also plays a key role in driving more live-shopping, equally opening up a swathe of new ‘live-commerce’ opportunities.
The Wrap
As TikTok continues to optimize its channels for eCommerce, the platform is also leaning more into current big trends by focusing on new in-stream shopping tools and live-stream shopping experiments to ride the waves of the latest shifts. In relation, it’s safe to say that these elements are central to TikTok’s ‘Community Commerce’ model.
Taking from TikTok’s recent discoveries, as well as from examples from Instagram and other platforms that have somewhat successfully integrated effective live-commerce practice, we can deduce that marketing by virtue of influence does often facilitate improved discovery and, in turn, better elicits direct action. Looking at the possibilities, marketers and brands can make use of this insight to optimize and get the most out of their revenue generation processes.
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