Susanne Mueller Zantop, Founder and Chairwoman of CEO Positions AG, enthusiastic about video for positioning and reputation building.
While standing in line at the checkout of my local Coop store, I saw two clearance bins with a special offer for colored kitchen appliances and a sign saying, “The TikTok carrot grater!” Such product offers used to be known from TV—the mass medium that everyone used to consume and that created needs that manufacturers very quickly implemented.
Is TikTok not only the dictator for what the youth pays attention to, but also for what is produced and consumed? And who will meet these “needs” if TikTok is banned again? What does it mean for you as an executive?
The format is the secret sauce.
Back in 2012, a platform called Vine introduced a 6-second video format, but the format and the company did not survive. Then came Musical.ly. Officially launched in 2014, it had a wide choice of music to dance/sing along to or do practically anything. In 2017, ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, bought Musical.ly, although TikTok itself was more popular. The growth in popularity was brought to TikTok during Covid, when in 2020, its registered users surpassed the 1 billion mark. The number of people using the format is rising constantly; in 2023, TikTok was estimated to count almost 2 billion users.
Regardless of the potential for the U.S. government to ban the app, one thing is clear: Short video is meant to stay, and the TikTok population will eventually find a new home. Recently, even LinkedIn has picked up TikTok’s video style. Hello, suits!
Therefore, it’s good to observe what’s happening. It does not matter if you are a CEO of a big multinational corporation or an owner of a local SMB.
How can you integrate the “secret sauce” into your “communication kitchen?”
Compelling content fitting a young audience’s attention span can be implemented in many places: LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, X. This way, you ensure that even if one platform gets banned, you do not lose your audience and content (or at least not all of it).
Short video, however, is not a format for your typical corporate content. Trust me, not many are interested in what strategy you have in mind to run the company. If your content is not instantly interesting to watch, your video will get skipped and be thrown to the back of the algorithm.
Remember how in school you used to go to a local factory, museum or cultural establishment to learn how things are done or had been done in the past? Why not offer the same thing in your videos? For example, if you are a Head of Comms at an enterprise that refines cotton for clothing production, take the viewer for a tour to one of the manufacturing facilities, showing how an employee is taking care of a machine. People working there likely have years of experience and have interesting stories. This way, you can not only produce engaging content for your short-form video channels, but also make your company look more human and improve reputation. For instance, Glass Onion shares videos introducing its workers and offering fun facts about them.
Leveraging the TikTok format is also about trends and humor. Consider hiring a team of young people to be responsible for what they know best. Deloitte takes advantage of this strategy in its videos. It seems that companies are usually late with it because they may focus on internal bureaucracy and analysis when it comes to communications, rather than catching up to trends. If you want both, trust the process to your TikTok team and trust your reputation to people dedicated to this issue. In cooperation, those two will be able to catch up to popular endeavors while keeping it professional.
Lastly, do not overkill the task. You should not produce a feature-length thriller telling the whole story about a company with Brad Pitt playing the main character. A phone, a video stabilizer and a loop microphone are enough to start. Keep in mind that you want to tell one small story at a time to keep the audience engaged.
Conclusion
Although the short video format is not new, companies are starting to catch up. Key tips: Keep it short, but unique and interesting. And don’t forget about the trends. If the content is trendy enough, it might even cause a blockage of a ski resort.
This format does have its own KPIs, so it is easily implemented into your communication strategy and evaluated afterwards. Remember that the short video format can be used not only on TikTok but also on Instagram and YouTube. You should definitely take advantage of all your video material because although the audiences overlap, you can get more new impressions just by posting the same video to different channels.
Remember that this list of examples provided is not exhaustive. Make your videos creative and innovative, and watch your engagement rise.
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