TikTok’s Middle East user base is soaring, and brands cannot afford to ignore that

YouTube, Instagram and TikTok has seen massive consumer adoption with more than 95 per cent of web users in MENA using them. TikTok became a trending platform by popularizing short-form content of typically less than two minutes. These byte-sized videos make user engagement fun, informal and highly lucrative. In fact, some creators have made more earnings on TikTok than the average S&P 500 CEO takehome packages.

It is not a surprise that TikTok has been the fastest to reach billions of subscribers; in fact, some studies show TikTok was more popular than Google in 2021. If competitors start copying the features, then most likely the company is doing something right – YouTube has launched “Shorts” and Instagram has “Reels” to compete with TikTok. The latter’s adoption has been impressive in MENA markets, with 50 per cent growth in last year and a 100 per cent increase in those using the platform for discovery. The average time spent was 80 minutes, making it the highest across the social media platforms.

These are impressive stats even by the high-growth tech ecosystem standards as they come on an already high user base set in 2020. Some of it could be explained by the broad and speedy tech adoption during the first year of the pandemic, but that was true for other platforms also. So what explains this hyper adoption of TikTok?

The personalization engine of Tiktok is able to learn user preferences fairly quickly and start personalizing the feed. It also helps the interface is simple with a single video displayed on the screen making navigation easier – especially true among younger users. Secondly, the short-form video format is quick to watch, engaging and feel closer to natural communication. The closest analogy is like having a quick chat with friends while long-form is like a formal presentation. Short-form is seeing massive adoption by capturing around 20 per cent of digital media time spend by MENA users. TikTok having spearheaded this format is the biggest beneficiary of this macro-trend.

The secret sauce of TikTok’s success is its creator community. TikTok has democratised content creation and unlocked the creative juices of the masses. Anyone can be a creator on TikTok as the videos are easy to make and have an informal feel to them. These micro-influencers have been critical drivers of TikTok growth, they have been able to express themselves and create a loyal following with their community. In fact, consumers view micro-influencer endorsements as more critical in making their purchase decisions than celebrity endorsements.

Micro-influencers have been able to promote brands they genuinely care about and improve brand awareness and sales, especially for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. More than 50 per cent of consumers mention micro-influencers as critical to their buying decisions. This has meant influencers have been able to create value doing what they love, which is creating TikTok content. This monetization has made it viable for them to continue to create content and keep the community engaged.

Historically, we have seen brands follow their consumers. It has already happened with TV, Google’s search, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram – consumers started spending more time on these and brands followed with advertising dollars. It is only a matter a time that brands will start integrating short-form platforms such as TikTok. Right now, there is a disparity, with consumers spending 20 per cent of their time on short-form media but brands only allocating 5 per cent of their spend on these platforms. This potentially has created a marketing RoI (return on investment) arbitrage, which will soon reduce the disparity between time spend and ad spend on short-form content.

In summary, micro-Influencers are the key to the hyper growth we are seeing on TikTok. We expect this trend to accelerate during Ramadan as consumers take advice from people they trust. And brands get new ways to communicate while thousands of local influencers get to make a living doing things they like best.