The fate of TikTok in the U.S is looming amid negotiations with potential buyers. The future is a question mark now as President Trump said he plans to shut down the Chinese-owned app if it is unable to sell its U.S operations before September 20 over security concerns. Meanwhile, business is as usual for the short video sharing app as it rolls out a new marketing partner program that will be housed under TikTok business. The company also announced the debut of a new editing feature called Stitch which allows users the ability to clip and integrate scenes from another user’s video into their own. It is also testing the new in-app eCommerce feature.
Launched officially in June, TikTok business is the company’s advertising platform and a hub for all marketing solutions for the app. The new marketing partner program has nearly 20 partner companies that can support brands and marketers in creating, executing, measuring, and boosting their ad campaigns. It will include companies across categories like campaign management (e.g. Sprinklr and Bidalgo), creative development (e.g. QuickFrame and Shuttlerock), branded effects (e.g. Bare Tree Media and Byte), and measurement(e,g, Kantar). The complete collaboration list is given below.
It is common for social media apps to add marketing partners, that’s doubling down the money through ad tech-based on its growing and engaging audience. This shows that TikTok has expansion plans to work with big brands, leverage its strong audience growth to build advertising opportunities, and sell products to them in an innovative way.
Melissa Yang, head of Ecosystem Partnerships, TikTok, noted in the blog post,
“With the launch of TikTok For Business, we’re building new opportunities for marketers to be creative storytellers and meaningfully engage with the TikTok community.”
“We’re thrilled to collaborate with some of the most strategic and trusted leaders in the advertising industry and continue giving marketers access to more tools to successfully create, measure and optimize ad campaigns on TikTok. We can’t wait to collaborate with partners to bring a creative and joyful experience to our brand partners and the broader TikTok community.”
Stitch, is a way to reinterpret and add to another user’s content, building on their stories, tutorials, recipes, math lessons, and more. It allows users to include up to five seconds of a video clip from another user in their own TikTok post.
Stitch has been in testing form in April and now its rolled out to users globally to kickstart a new trend in videos. TikTok said like Duets, users can decide whether to stitch videos or not by changing the settings for all videos in the Privacy settings or toggle for each individual video whether to use the feature or not.
Every video made by Stitch will attribute to the original creator in the caption and link directly to the original clipped video. This move ensures that the credit is given to the original creator and not get lost in the mix which is quite unusual on social media.
TikTok recently introduced an in-app shopping button to some users that directly links to e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Teespring in their videos. TikTok is partnering with eCommerce platforms to let creators sell merchandise directly through its app.
This new development will help TikTok to compete with its social media siblings like YouTube and Instagram. The shopping button will appear at the bottom left of the video and will be visible only in-app and not on a mobile browser or desktop. Creators can monetize their influence through merchandising and direct-to-consumer sales and can secure their own deals for sponsored posts. As per Business Insider reports, Teespring’s CEO said,
Its partnership with TikTok has drawn new interest in its merchandise and e-commerce tools from TikTokers. The company registered 900 new TikTok accounts on its platform in the first 24 hours after the integration was made public — a 13% increase
Presently, the shopping link feature works only with Teespring and Shopify, and users are not allowed to add links to unsupported websites. To add an e-commerce button to a ToikTok video, select add link choose a product on the video publishing page, and to this TikTok will automatically add a #sponsred hashtag to each post. The feature is still under evaluation before a full rollout.
Campaign Management –Partners that help plan, create, optimize, and measure marketing campaigns.
Creative Development – To build assets like videos that work on TikTok
Branded Effects- Partners that provide Virtual and Augmented-Reality services to brands from ideation to production for TikTok Branded Effects.
Measurement – To target and analyze campaigns
