TikTok’s giving customers extra room to clarify their content material, and join with customers, with a massive expansion of its video description field.
Woah…! TikTok has elevated video description character restrict to 2,200 characters!
That is enormous for creators and large by way of TikTok’s plans for turning into a search engine pic.twitter.com/kGhnL97uUM
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) September 23, 2022
As you possibly can see on this notification, posted by social media skilled Matt Navarra, TikTok has expanded the submit description discipline from 300 characters to 2,200 – a 730% enhance within the area obtainable to stipulate your clip.
As defined by TikTok:
“This lets you specific extra particulars about your creations, describing what your movies present, providing you with the chance to get nearer to your viewers, producing extra engagement whereas turning into extra searchable and higher beneficial by TikTok to viewers.”
The ‘searchable’ component is the important thing focus on this respect.
As we reported recently, TikTok is quick turning into a key search platform for youthful audiences, with Google’s VP Prabhakar Raghavan recently noting that:
“In our research, one thing like virtually 40% of younger individuals, once they’re in search of a spot for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”
That presents important alternative for TikTok, utilizing its extremely attuned, personalised, algorithmic method to refine and showcase related search matches, which can more and more relate to every customers’ pursuits.
That’s how search already capabilities within the Chinese language model of the app, Douyin, with many customers now turning to the app for extra personalized discovery.
As defined by Connie Chan of Andreesen Horowitz:
“On Douyin, which has been monetizing short-form video seek for years, movies are sometimes tagged with the names of shops and different places, and tapping on these hyperlinks takes customers to in-app pages the place they will reap the benefits of giant low cost coupons or particular bookings.”
Chan explains that through the use of its algorithmic benefits in understanding consumer behaviors, Douyin is ready to spotlight extra related search matches to every consumer, which improves the invention course of, whereas additionally enabling individuals to reap the benefits of reductions and different gives within the app.
“Because of the algorithms and consumer conduct on Douyin, the app can push new locations to a consumer that she or he would by no means have thought to seek for. Quick video successfully allows the continual discovery of the very best locations round you, and it will get higher with each swipe because the platform higher understands you and your pursuits.”
TikTok’s now seeking to faucet into the identical.
Final month, TikTok launched a brand new ‘Nearby’ content feed in testing, which displays content material posted by customers in your present location.
Because it’s rolled out extra broadly, that’ll allow TikTok to showcase domestically related updates, based mostly on the content material that you just interact with in your major ‘For You’ feed – which signifies that TikTok will be capable of spotlight extra posts from native enterprise, occasions and places, that relate to your pursuits.
The added room in your descriptions will improve this, with extra alternatives for key phrase matching, with a view to showcase extra related, native content material, which might be an enormous assist in highlighting related companies to customers. And if it follows the lead of Douyin, that might allow manufacturers to supply reductions and connection choices direct in-app, using TikTok’s large presence to nice impact.
And with projections that TikTok will attain 1.5 billion users before the year is out, that might be an enormous consideration for companies.
It’s not there simply but, however based mostly on the place Douyin has gone with search, you possibly can see the probably roadmap, which might make TikTok an much more necessary platform for native manufacturers, immediately connecting intent and curiosity to their choices.
‘Extra searchable and higher beneficial’. That is the important thing notice of focus from TikTok’s announcement, and it’s these parts that might change into a lot larger factors of notice for manufacturers transferring ahead.
These are simply the primary steps, and it might be price contemplating how constructing a TikTok presence now might enable you to capitalize on these developments as they change into extra important parts in future.