Let me TikTok it
New evidence from Google suggests that young people are now going to TikTok or Instagram to search before they ‘Google it’. Google’s Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan said “In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”
Whilst this is not completely shocking, something still must be said about the future of Google and as well as the future development of TikTok. TikTok is already leaning into the discovery angle with a range of new features, aside from its main eCommerce push.
Dual Camera Take Over
It seems like almost every platform on the mainstream market is developing a dual camera option, where users can capture photo or video out of two lenses. This feature was popularised by the up-and-coming social media app BeReal to help the platform in its bid to get utterly candid shots of users, but recently Instagram and Snapchat have also announced their own versions of the feature.
10 million are being real
The fledgling app BeReal has officially surpassed 10 million active users, rising from just 10,000 a year ago, certainly giving TikTok a run for its money when it comes to user growth. If you aren’t one of the 10,000,000 users, the premise of the app is that it sends out a prompt to all users at a random time each day, which asks people to share a photo of what they’re doing, right there and then, with a 2-minute time limit to post an update.
Meta ? NFT’s
In a recent announcement Meta has revealed that users on Facebook and Instagram will soon be able to share their NFT’s and digital collectibles on their accounts by linking their digital wallets. Although they aren’t the first of the Social Media giants to tap into this emerging digital space, TikTok last year released its own series of 6 NFT’s created by the platforms top 6 creators. The NFT’s were displayed at the Museum of the Moving Image in NY, the tokens were then released for sale.
Private Tweets
This month, Twitter is publicly rolling out its new feature ‘Twitter Circle’ allowing users to make private Tweets, which can only be shared with a select group of users decided by the author. A very similar concept to Instagram’s Close Friends stories. Yet another competitor copy.
