RPB Marketing | Content Marketing & Growth Marketing
Have you ever googled something and had to search through pages and pages without luck? This problem doesn’t happen with TikTok Search. One of the great benefits of this platform is that it allows us to get information in video format. But not only that. We get that information quickly, directly, clearly and, in many cases, honestly. Here I talk a bit about why this phenomenon occurs.
What would be a TikTok search?
TikTok itself does not have a name for its search engine. But, we are provisionally naming the TikTok search engine TikTok Search.
TikTok search filters searches on its platform, like any other social media browser, by following existing content and search trends. In other words, TikTok Search presents us with multimedia content that responds to real people to the searches that someone is carrying out. TikTok Search even helps content creators to use certain types of search to answer a common question that other users have already asked.
Advantages of TikTok search
Its main advantage is that its search engine presents video content in response to a user’s search. This makes content consumption much easier and more dynamic.
But, of course, doing a TikTok search has many other advantages. These are some of them:
- We get a clear and concise answer to an existing question.
- The content is more engaging as it is presented in videos.
- For content creators, it is attractive because they can monetise.
- Usually, the videos on TikTok are linked to other main sources.
- It has a content repository that not only presents information but also compares it, and critiques it, from experts or simply consumers of content who have an opinion.
F-reading in Google
There may be many reasons, but I believe that F-reading is one of the reasons for this paradigm shift. TikTok Search is a more user-friendly format for getting information.
One of the phenomena that promotes this behaviour of migrating searches from Google to TikTok is due to the type of audience and users. Digital consumption made F-reading, or screen reading, possible. In short, it means that people no longer read a whole article or news item, they just check their headings and keywords.
This type of reading has been proven thanks to software that monitors the movement of cursors on screens, as well as research that has tested the gaze of users on a screen. Rather than reading users only scan, they read relevant fragments about the information they are interested in.
TikTok search is better for users’ searches
As reading on the internet tends to become much faster, the ways of reading change as well. There is a huge torrent of information online. It affects people’s reading behaviour and habits. As a consequence, this type of reading emerges.
But in parallel, with the massive success of TikTok, this behaviour has also found a new habit. On TikTok, not only do we do F-reading, but due to the speed at which each video is presented, coupled with the massive amount of content that is uploaded to the platform, the way we receive information also changes.
This platform is more friendly to new media consumption. Users are more dynamic and faster when trying to get information. In this case, TikTok search responds to this type of consumption.
Although Google is one of the main search engines today, it is slowly losing its hegemony. Today, social media are widely used for content creation or content marketing. Therefore, it is also understandable that internet searches are migrating to these platforms, which offer search formats that are more adapted to consumer behaviour.
