TikTok is not only one of the most popular but also one of the most interesting social media applications. It is essentially a short video-making app that lets users do tons of both serious, entertaining things and some random goofy challenges. Users can use the app to sing, act, dance or mine pre-recorded songs or audio clips. TikTok puts an entire host of editing features at your fingertips, thus making the creation of content a breeze.

Aside from its fun end-user side, it has grown to become one of the most effective social media platforms, such that even the real money casino online industry is using it as an advertising channel. For the casino sector, this is possible because nearly all casino games ranging from classic slot machines, blackjack, baccarat, poker and even live dealers can now be played on smartphones. Thus, given that TikTok is a mobile-first application, operators and game developers post snapshots or video previews of their latest games and link them straight to their mobile gaming platforms. 

How did TikTok become such a force to be reckoned with in the already saturated social media world? Read on to find out more.

A Blast From the Past

TikTok is owned by a Chinese tech firm known as Byte Dance. The application came to being as a result of a union between 2 existing apps: Mucical.ly and Douyin offering users the best of two completely different apps. It is the only booming Chinese social media platform that has managed to capture even the Western world, owing to its interactive features. For the most part, TikTok has flourished through trending hashtags and challenges that users create and join. 

The concept of making short videos, however, didn’t start with TikTok. Short videos were a thing nearly a decade ago, through the now-defunct video application Vine, which was founded in 2012. Vine had something like 200 million monthly users all over the world, aged between 18 to 24 years. After a complicated chain of events, Vine was finally discontinued by its parent company Twitter in 2016, and a void was left in the marketplace for a short video uploading and sharing platform. TikTok successfully managed to fill that gap and continues growing in popularity month after month.

Seemingly, it’s like once every couple of years, a new app comes out that starts to redefine how we use social media. At the moment, TikTok is charting the course for generation Z, providing more varied ways through which we can interact in the digital age.

What Makes TikTok so Appealing?

Currently, people are always looking for sources of micro-entertainment that offer short bursts of distraction from day-to-day activities, and TikTok became a solution for that. All TikTok videos are enjoyable and brief – this is primarily what makes it stand out.

Like other social media platforms, on TikTok, you can follow numerous other accounts and make a feed of fresh content from your most favourite creators. There’s also a ‘For You’ feed that displays a random variety of videos from other creators to churn in a never-ending thread of fresh stuff to watch. This feature also makes the video app rather addictive. 

One great thing concerning the ‘For You’ feed is that it displays content from users that you wouldn’t typically follow unlike apps like Instagram and YouTube whose ‘Explore’ feeds are based on what you usually watch. Maybe this is one more reason why the TikTok platform is so appealing and so much cooler than the rest. Thus, even if you don’t have that many followers, you can still go viral and become an online superstar overnight. 

Additionally, one of the other strongest features of TikTok is the ease with which users can edit and repurpose videos. What you can do on TikTok in a split second could easily take you hours of work if say you wanted to publish it on YouTube.

Better yet, TikTok is preferably optimized to produce memes – who doesn’t like a good laugh anyway? With the app, you can repurpose audio recordings from other videos and make an exclusive take on somebody’s conception. 

A Basic Social Media Platform at Heart!

On top of the impressive perks that TikTok comes with, it also has the typical features that you’d expect a social media channel to have, including the ‘like’, ‘comment’ and direct messages options. So, while it brings something different and exciting to the table, it is still a standard social media platform like any other.