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TikTok Has Become the Most Popular App in the Western World, What’s it Mean for Legal Bloggers?

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October 24, 2022

How did TikTok go from a niche social network for lip-syncing teens to the most popular app in the Western World, threatening to knock off Facebook in just a few years, asks the The Guardian’s Alex Hern this morning.

What does this mean for legal bloggers?

Legal blogging is all about establishing a reputation and relationships in niche areas of the law.

Anticipating the information, insight and answers their audience is looking for, legal bloggers develop intimate relationships with those they reach through authentic blogging.

Twenty years ago when legal blogging began, we had one medium for communicating with our audience – our blog.

Not that this was all all bad, many lawyers became household names in niches solely by blogging.

Today, our audience has moved from blogs and Google, alone, to social media. LinkededIn, Twitter, and Facebook are strategically used by legal bloggers to connect and build a name.

Why should legal bloggers consider TikTok?

The size of the audience – of all ages, admittedly skewing towards the 20’s and 30’s age groups.

Better yet, TikTok’s For You Page (FYP) and the algoritm that guides it will enable you, as a legal blogger, to engage people who would never have discovered you, nor you, them.

Even if you have no followers at all, your video will eventually make it on to someone’s For You Page, and if they are deemed to have engaged positively, you can reach thousands or millions of viewers extremely quickly.

Hern is spot on as to what keeps me “using” TikTok over my morning coffee.

The FYP is the default screen new users see when opening the app. Even if you don’t follow a single other account, you’ll find it immediately populated with a never-ending stream of short clips culled from what’s popular across the service. That decision already gave the company a leg-up compared to the competition: a Facebook or Twitter account with no friends or followers is a lonely, barren place, but TikTok is engaging from day one.

It’s what happens next that is the company’s secret sauce, though. As you scroll through the FYP, the makeup of videos you’re presented with slowly begins to change, until, the app’s regular users say, it becomes almost uncannily good at predicting what videos from around the site are going to pique your interest.

Legal bloggers with a tight niche are apt to attract a nice TikTok audience within a short time, let’s say less than a year.

An audience you’d like to reach which will see you as a reliable and trusted in your niche.

TikTok, like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, is anciallary to your home base, your blog.

But social media – including, possibly, TikTok, unlike twenty years ago, is necessary for legal bloggers looking to effectively network through the Internet.