During WAN-IFRA’s recent virtual Newsroom Summit conference, three news executives shared learnings from their experimentation with TikTok.
Click here to watch the full recording of the session.
With more than a billion monthly active users worldwide, TikTok has firmly established itself as a top social media app, especially popular among younger demographics.
According to Gabriela Campbell, co-founder of Ac2ality in Spain, TikTok users “want things quick and easy”, and Ac2ality aims to provide that with easily digestible news in video form.
How Ac2ality became Spain’s biggest news player on TikTok
Ac2ality started out as an Instagram account but soon moved to TikTok where it accrued 3.5 million followers within a year. The format that kicked off its success, increasing follower numbers from 900 to 40,000 overnight, was called “5 things about today”, a brief video summary of the day’s most important news stories.
In Spain, Ac2uality is now the biggest news player on TikTok, ahead of much larger news organisations such as The Washington Post, NBC or El Mundo. Its audience is mainly made up of Gen Z but also comprises even younger users.
“The reason they like Ac2uality is because they don’t have the capacity to read a news article, however, they’re still really interested in what’s going on in the world,” Campbell said. “So Ac2uality is the only way for them to understand what is going on.”
With 80 percent of its audience based in Spain and 20 percent in Latin America, Ac2uality is now also looking into launching an account in English.
While the company has expanded to other platforms, such as YouTube and Twitch, TikTok remains the strongest platform.
For Campbell, understanding the habits and wants of the younger generation is key to finding success on the app, as well as putting in the time to understand how the platform works and to become part of the community. Campbell herself spends about four hours per day on the app to keep up with the latest trends.
“You need to understand the inside jokes, you need to understand the memes, you need to understand the trends,” Campbell said.
Unlocking new demographics via TikTok
One legacy player that is experimenting with TikTok is The Standard Group in Kenya, the first media house in the country to launch an account on the platform.
Still in its experimental phase, The Standard’s account is about a year old and has gained some 24,000 followers. The most popular video has some 800,000 views.
“We are using it especially to unlock new demographics because we realise that if we’ve been here for a hundred years and want to be around in another hundred years, we need a new generation of audiences that will be there,” said Joan Mwai, Echo Editor of The Standard Group.
The Standard has been experimenting with a range of formats on the platform, such as behind the scenes videos, fun facts, dance challenges, duet videos, and gaffes.
“I think there is still some mystery around how journalism happens, so videos that show things are not as perfect as audiences may hear them on the radio or see them on TV have actually done quite well,” she said.
Putting emphasis on experimentation
At Le Parisien in France, experimenting with different formats is also a core part of its TikTok strategy. Le Parisien launched its account in September 2021 and hired a journalist dedicated solely to the app who is part of a new team called “Shorts”, which focuses on producing vertical video for social media only.
Since the launch, Le Parisien’s account has gained 225,000 subscribers, and accrued some three million likes. Initially, Le Parisien produced a lot of explainers about politics and the French presidential election in particular, but it is now trying out other formats such as data visualisations, reports, recipe videos, and a weekly show called “Crime Story”.
“What we’ve learned after eight months is that hiring a TikTok journalist was really the key, and we could test and learn, and he’s more and more famous and popular on the platform,” said Aurelien Viers, Editor in Chief of the Web Video Department at Le Parisien.
“With regard to what works, we saw that hashtags and trends are important but also the retention rates, completion rates, the number of comments and shares.”