The Message is the Medium, and the Medium is TikTok

Video has become the most effective form of communication to reach people and engage them. This has been a trend since the television set became a mainstay of every American home – the nightly news eclipsing newspapers in reach. Fast-forward 60 years, and almost everyone has a screen with the capacity to watch videos anywhere at any time. And it’s not just the news. Advertising, education and entertainment are all competing for their viewers’ attention. 

So how do we know what content works best? Meeting viewers where they’re at to start. It’s what our most recent article analysis found from a Slate article on the White House’s push to get more young people vaccinated. TikTok influencers posted about their own experience with the vaccine, or their questions on the subject, and Slate ranked them from most effective to least. The largest entity in our entity word cloud is the social media giant, TikTok – positively coloured to demonstrate the sentiment associated with the new platform. This should be a clear indicator of the power of this medium. It has dominated the conversation since it’s become the trendiest social media platform. Only one influencer even gets a positive mention, @taylorcassidyj, because of her crowdsourced questions featured in the video. Though the video itself was not fact-pacted, she was guided by her viewers which is always a successful strategy. 

This means having video content to publish is not enough, posting the right content in the right place is of utmost importance. The message is the medium to quote Marshall McLuhan. 

See our full article analysis here.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash