Weird & Wonderful TikTok
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #154 ❤️
This week we’ll be diving into the weird and wonderful world of TikTok.
Unlike Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, which have remained by and large pretty mainstream, TikTok has something for literally anyone and everyone, thanks to their famously powerful algorithm.
From selling houses and crime shaming, to packing videos and recipe reactions, are there no limits to what we will watch 18 seconds of? Also, what can the official Paralympic account get away with?
Let’s get into it.
Were you forwarded this? Not a subscriber? 👉 Sign up here
#1 Through The Keyhole
Despite the demographic of TikTok being pretty (read very) young, Real Estate content is booming there. The hashtag “property” has over 3.6 million views and counting, and estate agents are taking to the app to share house tours.
However, is the content actually helping estate agents sell properties and viewers buy them, or is it just a voyeuristic form of entertainment, like MTV Cribs back in the day? Well, a bit of both.
London estate agent Tanya Baker has seen some significant selling success (try saying that ten times fast) compared to real estate specific sites such as Rightmove. In two weeks, a listing on Rightmove yielded 4,500 page views compared to a whopping 1.1 million views on TikTok, to which she credits the house being sold within a matter of weeks.
She also notes that TikTok allows her to show off properties in a fun and creative way – the videos are filmed in portrait for the app, sped up and with text overlay and the occasional cameo from her dog.
However the property genre has also become another entertainment category on TikTok, giving rise to viral content such as the videos from Caleb Simpson, known for asking people on the street how much their rent is then taking his over 7 million followers on a tour of their homes.
The TikTok property scene is a way for young people to live out their home-owning dreams vicariously, but has also allowed them to find like-minded flatmates. Gen Z have compared the way they use TikTok to the way older people use Facebook marketplace, noting that thanks to the algorithm they are able to find people with extremely similar interests.
Truly, who would have thought? And seriously, check out those home tour videos if you want to be very very jealous of some very very lucky people in New York city. Or, if you’re just nosy.
#2 - TikTok Vs. Crime
Along with the insides of houses, up for sale or not, another unlikely viral TikTok genre has emerged – crime videos.
Videos of alleged petty crimes are popping up across the app under the hashtags “shoplifter”, which has 863,000 million views, and “theft”, boasting 1.5 billion views. There are currently dozens of anonymous accounts, with names such as @shoplifethero and @gasstationthieves0.
The people uploading the content maintain that they’re seeking justice or raising awareness, such as a plain clothes officer for a private security company who works in high-street stores, mainly on London’s Oxford Street. He would often film the people he detained, to either show to police or his colleagues, but now his videos have found a new home on TikTok.
While he wishes to remain anonymous as he’s not actually allowed to film his work, he doesn’t think his subjects should be allowed to – stating that he films their faces in order to warn others. He now spends his days off trawling the streets for criminal activity to film.
These types of videos, which typically use trending TikTok sounds, are a pretty controversial form of entertainment. A professor of cultural geography and critical criminology has weighed in, urging that social media content showing people committing crime (allegedly) could stoke fear and hate, making people more paranoid and reaffirming the stereotypes they already have.
He also argues that filming already marginalized people without their consent is unethical, but that certainly hasn’t stopped people from watching it in the billions.
#3 Experience Your Purchase
The next in an unexpectedly long list of unusual viral TikTok genres – packing videos.
Cast your mind back a few years to when unboxing videos inundated YouTube, we loved watching people unpacking what they’d ordered online, often a trending item such as the newest Nike trainers, or iPhone. Well, it’s like the opposite of that.
The hashtag #packingorders currently has more than 9 billion views on TikTok. Companies selling food. jewelry, and even crystals film their orders being fulfilled, and some even charge customers for the privilege of watching their items be packed – which they happily do.
Mostly done by small businesses, people eat these packing videos up, often begging in the comments to have their order done next. They’re a powerful marketing tool, with one small business saying that they boosted her sales so dramatically that they haven’t had to do any paid advertising since 2020, and rely only on the traffic from their packing videos, with another having her husband join her full time in her business after leaving his job thanks to their 530,000 TikTok followers.
A psychologist explains the strong reaction to the content in that the filming of the process turns the purchase into a gift-giving experience - you’re watching them wrap it for you with care - and notes that the human brain responds more to the anticipation of a reward than receiving it, meaning that watching your order be packed may be even better than getting it delivered.
While the content creators interviewed noted that filming orders is an incredibly time consuming process, and in some cases like another full-time job, they now can’t do without it, making their business two-fold – selling not only the products in the videos, but content and an experience.
#4 - Recipe Reactors Wanted
TikTok is full of recipe videos, and such is the nature of our world, they are often absolutely terrible. Now, while it came out recently that videos of awful food on TikTok are intentionally created as something called “rage bait” – content which is designed to get viewers riled up and get comments, shares and ultimately more views for the creator – they also apparently feed “an entire online ecosystem” accord to Wired magazine.
Thanks to the sheer number of truly bad recipes now on TikTok, a literal new job has emerged: Recipe Reactor. Creators respond to terrible recipe videos, superimposing themselves over the videos in question and adding their own commentary.
The most popular of these accounts, Chef Reactions, was once, as the name suggests, a chef, and now makes his living through posting these videos. He says that while he isn’t “set for life” from the back of his recipe reaction videos, he could take a year off recording to be with his family if he wanted to, so make of that what you will.
His deadpan tone and obvious culinary knowledge have made him a huge hit, with over three million followers on TikTok, but he says that he sees himself as being in the 14th minute of his 15 minutes of fame, and is just happy with what he’s managed to do so far.
While some recipe reactors get by on the bare minimum, making a couple of comments or faces over the original video, the most popular ones give either meaningful input or true horror in the face of the recipe itself.
Our definition of entertainment really does continue to be pushed to its limits every day…
#5 - Paralympics TikTok Content Raises Eyebrows
Scrolling through TikTok you may come across content which perches on the border between acceptably funny and simply offensive, and some users feel that recent content featuring Paralympic athletes is crossing that border.
Video clips featuring wheelchair basketballers toppling over and blind footballers scrambling for the ball, all featuring a comedic track, a la TikTok. But who would post something like that?
Well, it turns out, the official Paralympics TikTok account would.
BBC Newsbeat spoke to the International Paralympics committee, who stated that the account is run by a Paralympian who “fully understands disability” and has “created a strong following through edgy and unique content”. The purpose of the content is to educate a wider audience about Paralymic sport and showcase the achievements of the athletes.
Paralympic athlete Jack Hunter-Spivey thinks the videos are simply funny, arguing that people usually focus on portraying paralympic athletes as inspirational, but they’re also normal people who know how to laugh at themselves when they fall over – even if they’re falling over in a wheelchair. Others have noted that it’s a way to make people more comfortable with disability.
Not everyone agrees though, as England Amputee footballer Sean Jackson thinks it’s a shame that the account seems to be just playing for laughs.
He would rather the account showed the achievements of athletes, commenting that most videos seem to be trying to entertain people by showing the difficulties of Paralympic sports in a mocking way, and noting that only a couple of videos show the athletes actually doing something successfully.
It’s easy to try and get cheap laughs on a platform like TikTok, where most videos are very short and meme content is the most popular with users, and the danger with that is that it’s a slippery slope, as Sean Jackson points out, into making the people behind the sport into a joke.
On the other hand, normalising disability and taking some of the serious edge away from something like the Paralympics is important in the sense that, as Jack Hunter-Spivey says, Paralympic athletes can also have a laugh. The account may just need to be careful not to play too much into the hands of TikTok and its slightly trashy sense of humour.
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
The Secret Underworld Of Online Games
Okay, it’s not as sinister as it sounds.
Before teens were on TikTok, all we had was video games on school computes.
Well it turns out the oldies are still the best, as they’re still driving kids crazy today.
To find out more on how you can retain your top talent, or how we can help you with digital solutions to your business and marketing challenges, check out our case studies.