On the Podcast: TikTok wants your social circles

FYI, Tubefilter has a podcast.

It’s hosted by our very own Joshua Cohen (that’s me) and Lauren Schnipper. Subscribe to Creator Upload on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

And we’re now also brought to you in part by Nikon. 

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Snapchat’s pull on American adolescents is gravitationally intense.

My niece got an iPhone from her parents when she turned 13. There were no social media apps on it. Now – after relentless teenage determination and several debates – there’s one. But Snapchat doesn’t “count” because it’s the way she “stays in touch with her friends.”

This is a case study of one ☝️, but looking at the data it can’t possibly be unique 👇.

Snapchat currently has 397 million daily active users and says 90% of 13-to-24-year-olds in 20+ countries are active at least monthly on the app. Here are a few other curated stats from their marketing page:

• People who use Snapchat open the app nearly 40 times a day² and send 5 billion+ messages, known as Snaps, to close friends and family.
• Snapchat users’ close friends are 4X more influential than celebrities or influencers on their purchasing decisions.

In short, a very high percentage of Gen Z around the world uses Snapchat and they use it to stay in touch with their social circles and Snapchat claims those relationships are more meaningful in terms of purchasing influence than any other relationships those users have on any other social network.

It’s a compelling story around a coveted demographic. So obviously, TikTok wants a piece.

A number of job postings indicating TikTok’s messaging ambitions recently appeared on the company’s careers page

. They’re technically for TikTok Social, but the posting describe it as “the messaging team on TikTok,” where new hires will help take TikTok’s messaging experience out of its “infancy” by developing an expanded chat service.

“Social Interaction team is mainly focusing on building a reliable and adaptive platform that enables users to meet and interact with their real-life friends seamlessly on TikTok, and encourage them to share their life moments with each other and stay connected regardless of where they are,” reads one of the postings. “Some core features and components we build and maintain include Story, Video Like, Comment, Friends Tab, Inbox Tab, Repost, TikTok Now feature and standalone app, etc.”

TikTok recently celebrated over 150 million active users in the United States. It’s hard to find specific numbers here, but looks like they already spend close to an hour a day on the app. It’s taking up a greater percentage of people’s entertainment attention than ever before. Now just imagine the pull if it started to become a key component of their social sphere, too.

Lauren gets triggered and I get into all this and more on the latest installment of Creator Upload. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whenever you listen. You’re gonna dig it.

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