Reasons Why TIKTOK Is Difficult To Emulate Other Apps

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Physical distancing seems to make many people more active on social media. TikTok is no exception. Even before the pandemic, this short video application was also booming and became an alternative for netizens' entertainment. The success of this application cannot be separated from its "uniqueness" and is difficult to imitate with other applications.

Citing Tech Crunch, there are actually other apps that are trying to make short video alternatives like TikTok. Namely Facebook and YouTube. Facebook has developed an application called Facebook Lasso, as well as Instagram Reels in the Instagram application.

 

While YouTube has the name YouTube Short. The concept is similar to TikTok, making short videos with background music or sounds. But surprisingly, these two apps don't work like TikTok.

 

According to Tech Crunch, what makes TikTok so successful is its remixability, or the ease with which it can remix sounds. Yep, TikTok makes it easy for users to use remixed sounds with the "use this sound" option on existing content. You don't have to bother making new sounds to be able to create content on TikTok, although you can make your own if you want to.

 

Even though we use voices that have been used in other people's content, it doesn't necessarily make the content we upload boring and unoriginal. The videos that we upload still have value because each user has their own preferences based on their own experiences and can ultimately produce diverse content.

 

For example, this video with the background song Any Song belongs to Zico. The movements are actually just like that, but there are millions of videos with the same theme but all of them are equally entertaining because each has its own uniqueness. Some may wear funny costumes to make them different, record outdoors, with friends, with parents, all kinds of things.

 

What makes TikTok also dominate the video application is being able to share videos with the original uploader. Yep, we can make a video from an existing sound, plus insert a video from the original uploader or the previous uploader. So it's as if we're making a video together.

 

Imagine if the one invited to "collaborate" was our favorite artist. Beuh, who doesn't want a direct duet with their idol?

 

It doesn't have to be music, TikTok is also fun because there are many choices of dubbing sounds. It's like Dubsmash, really. But on TikTok, users don't just dub in front of the cellphone screen. We can also act as if we were in a sitcom like that. Creations like this make playing TikTok even more fun.

 

The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckeberg, once said that TikTok is actually easy to create and implement in other applications. For example Instagram. "I think TikTok is a lot like Explore on Instagram Stories," he explained as quoted by Tech Crunch.

 

Instagram itself has a Snapchat-inspired Story feature. Instagram had great success with the Story feature, even beating the original app.

 

But it's a different matter for TikTok. Stories are easy to apply to Instagram because the templates are more or less the same. In TikTok, the way it works is like a template but with a much larger database.

 

All content is a database that can be reused by other users. It's different from Stories, where we can't directly copy voices from other people's stories.

 

What's more, TikTok also makes it easy for users to find sound material for the most appropriate content. Instead of searching directly among the billions of databases, TikTok already provides categories such as Trending, For You, Greatest Hits, Travel, Gaming, and others.

 

Tech Crunch predicts that TikTok's glory will continue and may even increase as people's interest in creating video content increases (*)