TikTok Pronounces a Large Improve to its Video Descriptions because it Leans into Discovery

TikTok’s giving customers extra room to clarify their content material, and join with customers, with a massive expansion of its video description field.

As you may see on this notification, posted by social media knowledgeable Matt Navarra, TikTok has expanded the publish description discipline from 300 characters to 2,200 – a 730% improve within the area accessible to stipulate your clip.

As defined by TikTok:

“This allows you to express more details about your creations, describing what your videos show, giving you the opportunity to get closer to your audience, generating more engagement while becoming more searchable and better recommended by TikTok to viewers.”

The ‘searchable’ ingredient is the important thing focus on this respect.

As we reported lately, TikTok is quick changing into a key search platform for youthful audiences, with Google’s VP Prabhakar Raghavan lately noting that:

“In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place 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, customized, algorithmic strategy 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 custom-made discovery.

As defined by Connie Chan of Andreesen Horowitz:   

“On Douyin, which has been monetizing short-form video search for years, videos are often tagged with the names of stores and other locations, and tapping on these links takes users to in-app pages where they can take advantage of large discount coupons or special bookings.”

Chan explains that by utilizing its algorithmic benefits in understanding person behaviors, Douyin is ready to spotlight extra related search matches to every person, which improves the invention course of, whereas additionally enabling individuals to make the most of reductions and different affords within the app.

“Thanks to the algorithms and user behavior on Douyin, the app can push new places to a user that he or she would never have thought to search for. Short video effectively enables the continuous discovery of the best places around you, and it gets better with every swipe as the platform better understands you and your interests.”

TikTok’s now trying to faucet into the identical.

Final month, TikTok launched a brand new ‘Nearby’ content material 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 have interaction with in your principal ‘For You’ feed – which implies 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, in an effort to showcase extra related, native content material, which may very well be a giant assist in highlighting related companies to customers. And if it follows the lead of Douyin, that would 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 customers earlier than the 12 months is out, that may very well be an enormous consideration for companies.

It’s not there simply but, however based mostly on the place Douyin has gone with search, you may see the probably roadmap, which may make TikTok an much more essential platform for native manufacturers, straight connecting intent and curiosity to their choices.

‘More searchable and better recommended’. That is the important thing notice of focus from TikTok’s announcement, and it’s these components that would turn out to be a lot larger factors of notice for manufacturers shifting ahead.

These are simply the primary steps, and it could be price contemplating how constructing a TikTok presence now may enable you capitalize on these tendencies as they turn out to be extra important components in future.