Ticktockers of Hickman

Ticktockers+of+Hickman

Halid Ibrahimovic, Abigail Gordon, Jonathon Chatfield

Tiktok is one of the most new, viral social media platform to have come out lately so it’s no surprise when people from our own school are using and uploading content onto these networks. People who make online content are often called “content creators”. They are not just some vocal minority on the internet consisting of people like celebrities and popular name brands, in fact 55% of people who have Tik Tok have uploaded their own video at some point according to Globalwebindex. 

“It’s fun and people like my videos.” says Gage Blanton, a freshman here at Hickman. “I don’t make one every day. But I haven’t been active recently because the trends that are going around I really can’t think of any ideas. But on average I probably post like two or three times a week”. 

Blanton has a total of 11.4k followers on Tik Tok, a relatively new social platform where its users can watch other people’s short videos along with having the ability to create their own content on the platform. Blanton’s most viewed video has 300k views. Popular creators on the app such as Danielle Cohn and Jacob Sartorius can have millions of views and likes on each video they make with them making money through sponsors, endorsements, and donations from users. 

Blanton acknowledges that he hasn’t hit this level of popularity on Tik Tok and states he, “hopes to be famous one day”. However, it seems that he has already developed a decent audience on Tik Tok.

His viewers often comment positive reactions to his videos by saying they “get laughs.” 

Commonly, Blanton is seen as an attractive icon as some comment things like, “bae”.

His viewers are so intrigued they they request to be in a collaborative video with Blanton.

“Some people think I’m their boyfriend but I’m not, and they want to be my duet in my videos. A lot of people duet my videos, so I think that they like my videos.” 

Similar to Gage, Senior, Thomas Brown also has a Tik Tok account where he regularly posts videos. Thomas has 54.5K followers and 1.7 million total likes on his account. 

“I usually think of a good idea and I talk to my friends about it to see if it sounds good first.”

Brown has a routine to work through preparing his videos.

“My friends had Tik Tok and they said, “Thomas you should get this, ‘you’re really good at making people laugh and making video’, so I went for it” 

It is safe to say that Thomas has had a lot of success on the platform when it comes to how well his videos are doing with his most viewed video having 2.5 million views and his most liked video receiving 216k likes.

“That was very exciting,” he said.

Referring to his success on the app, “one of the first videos I got back it got like 2.5 million views and it just gave me that feeling like maybe I can be good at this and that I should keep going.” 

TikTok which started out as “Douyin” in China can mostly attribute its success to being one of the most viral platforms in China due in part to the Chinese government banning many other social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube which lets TikTok flourish more than it could have had those have been available. This app also allows pretty much anyone to become a popular creator so long as they come up with content that will interest their viewers with many celebrities on the app such as Ariana Grande, and Howie Mandel having less followers than people like Loren Gray who has 33.6 Million followers all from building up her profile from Musical.ly which later became TikTok in August 2018 which led to Gray getting a deal signed with Virgin Records and getting three of her own music singles released. 

“When I first started posting it was like 12 likes and maybe 35 on a good day,” says Josh Hatton, a tiktoker at our school with over 60k followers “but once I started to realize what content people wanted and got creative, I started gaining and as the followers grew a moment of reality check kept hitting me that thousands of people are literally following me and hundreds of thousands of people are actually watching me.” Josh has also accumulated over 844k total likes on the platform with his TikTok being the most followed social media account he has. “I plan to create content for my followers for as long as I can maintain the time for it because it’s something I actually enjoy doing and want to see people happy so I will try and succeed at this for as long as possible.” says Hatton about his plans on this for the future.

Although you may need to work and produce content for a while in order to develop a following on these video platforms, Brown offered a bit of advice to anyone who would like to make videos for an online audience.

“First of all, be appropriate and know what you’re doing and just have fun while you’re doing it.”