TikTok

TikTok is the world's most downloaded app and one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in history, operated by ByteDance, a Chinese technology company founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012. TikTok was launched internationally in 2018 following ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly, and has since grown to over a billion monthly active users across more than 150 countries — achieving in five years what it took Facebook and Instagram a decade to build.

The TikTok format — short-form vertical video combined with an exceptionally powerful recommendation algorithm (the For You Page, or FYP) — creates an engagement pattern unlike any previous social platform. The algorithm serves content based on engagement signals rather than social connections, meaning any creator or brand can achieve viral reach regardless of follower count. This democratisation of reach has made TikTok both exciting and unpredictable as a marketing channel.

TikTok for brands

TikTok's advertising platform — TikTok Ads Manager — offers In-Feed Ads appearing in the native feed, TopView (full-screen ads appearing when users open the app), Brand Takeovers, Branded Hashtag Challenges, and Branded Effects. The platform has also developed a robust creator marketplace connecting brands with TikTok creators for sponsored content partnerships — a form of advertising that tends to perform strongly given that creator content is native to the TikTok format in a way that traditional ads are not.

TikTok Shop

TikTok Shop is the platform's integrated e-commerce product, allowing brands and creators to sell products directly within the TikTok app. Shoppable videos, live shopping streams where hosts demonstrate and sell products in real-time, and a product showcase tab all reduce the friction between discovery and purchase to essentially zero. TikTok Shop has seen explosive growth in markets where it has launched — Southeast Asia first, followed by the UK and the United States — and represents one of the most significant new e-commerce channels to emerge in years.