Cultural Content – YouTube, TikTok, Threads
Discovery Engine platforms and what Threads is doing in the mix
Hi there cultural content readers,
In the last post I wrote about the more established social media platforms; Facebook, Twitter (‘X’), and Instagram. One of the key grouping characteristics of these platforms is that the content you see (certainly in the original iterations of the platforms) was largely based on those you ‘follow’. This is also known as ‘social graph’ based platforms.
YouTube and TikTok are different in this regard, because – although they have a ‘follow’ feature – most people get content on these platforms via the algorithm’s recommendations (the ‘For You’ page on TikTok or the YouTube homepage).
This is a more dynamic discovery mechanism than social-graph based platforms as it’s not restricted to the people/accounts a user already knows about, and it’s designed to optimise for attention, not relevance of the personal connection between you and another account.
In this post, I’m looking at YouTube and TikTok – and also Threads, and what that adds to the social media mix. This post will cover who’s on these different platforms, what the companies behind the platforms are interested in and how that correlates with certain content types.
In subsequent weeks I’ll look more specifically at more specialist platforms like LinkedIn and Pinterest, and also derive overarching principles of what opportunities these platforms represent to the cultural sector.
Without more ado…
YouTube
I wrote a previous Cultural Content on YouTube and how best to optimise it, so I’ll do a quick summary here. Check out the link above for the detailed stuff.
Where did this platform come from?
In 2005 YouTube looked like this:
Ahhhh *internet nostalgia eyes*. YouTube in 2005 looked quite similar to Google – it had a big search bar and relied a lot more on the user’s input to surface content (Google did in fact buy YouTube in 2006, but has since then been careful to differentiate YouTube as a discovery engine and Google as a search engine).
If we fast forward to the YouTube homepage today:
…we can see the main change since 2005 is that the YouTube homepage customises the content it shows you based on what you’ve watched before and what it knows about you generally (for example your location data and whether you’re on a mobile or desktop).
There’s lots more info about how it’s doing that, what that means for content creators and why the algorithm has changed in my previous post on YouTube.
Who’s on the platform?
2.5 billion people in the world use YouTube on a monthly basis. That’s the next largest platform after Facebook (which has 3 billion monthly online users). Within the UK, that number shifts to 41 million people (compared to 45 million Facebook users); again very high penetration considering the population of the UK is 67 million.
One interesting feature of YouTube as a platform for cultural sector organisations is it has a more balanced gender and age split than we typically see on Facebook and Instagram.
In almost every cultural sector Facebook and Instagram account I’ve looked at (with the exception of military and science museums) there is a significant gender bias towards female followers, and typically a median age profile of around 35 on Instagram and 40+ on Facebook.
What’s interesting about YouTube viewer stats is that they almost always have a much more even split of male/female viewers and a much more even breakdown across the age brackets.
One of the key differences (compared to Facebook and Instagram) is that for most cultural sector accounts at least 95% of their YouTube views will come from non-followers. Which means discovery engine platforms like YouTube and TikTok give you a higher likelihood that you’ll reach audiences that don’t already know about you organically, but have a topical interest in content you’re creating.
TikTok
Where did this platform come from?
The platform originally launched in 2014 as Musical.ly in China. It allowed you to record 15 second to 1 minute lip synching videos (which explains a lot of the early content, and cultural-sector-content-creator head scratching when we first came across it).
In 2018 the platform was bought by ByteDance Ltd (also Chinese) and was renamed ‘TikTok.’ There have been significant concerns raised about the privacy of TikTok data as it’s unclear what ByteDance does with user data, and – in particular – if it shares it with the Chinese government. TikTok collects data such as your IP address, mobile carrier, unique device identifiers, keystroke patterns, location data and biometric data such as “faceprints and voiceprints”. The platform is currently banned in India and on government devices in countries including the UK, US, the European Parliament, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway.
Who’s on the platform?
A lot of people. Despite all the above, and being the newest of the platforms we’ve talked about so far, it already had 1 billion monthly active users (so roughly double Twitter’s, and 1/3rd of Facebook’s).
The UK has 23 million TikTok users (so around a 1/3rd of the population have an account). The highest age segment is 18-24; younger than the average age of users on other platforms.
COVID vastly accelerated TikTok’s uptake and usage. TikTok was the most downloaded app in 2020, 2021 and 2022 (and is on track to be the most downloaded in 2023 too).
TikTok is not just influential in terms of number of downloads, the amount of time people are spending in the platform is also very different from what we’ve seen on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Children spend on average 75 minutes a day on TikTok, a much higher level of engagement than the equivalent metric on more established platforms.
What’s it good for?
TikTok content benefits from time spent in the platform. It takes a while to get used to but there is a lot of learning and culture-sector-appropriate content on there. #ArtTok, #BookTok and #EduTok are some nice examples for getting a feel for how to present educational content on the channel.
One myth attached to the platform is that you have to be up on and react to the latest TikTok ‘trends’. Whilst certain trending sounds and dances can present a good opportunity for cultural sector organisations to reach a wider audience, done badly they can fall flat.
It’s also perfectly practical to plan a ‘season’ of content in advance and push it out, albeit with planned calendar tie ins. This has been the Black Country Living Museum’s modus operandi on TikTok; not constantly publishing and reacting to short term trends, but planning a ‘season’ of content at a time:
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There are different approaches to creating culture-sector-appropriate TikTok content. For example:
having a distinctive ‘face’ or presenter of your content.
character led accounts (certain actors at Past Pleasures have become TikTok celebrities this way, and crop up across multiple cultural sector accounts).
duplicating video content from Instagram to TikTok (NB this is unlikely to work as well as a TikTok-first approach).
For more info:
Digital Culture Network’s ‘Beginner’s Guide to TikTok’
Abby Bird’s ‘TikTok for Museums - an introduction’
And if it all still sounds too alien, I’d thoroughly recommend Mary McGillivray’s TikTok Creator Directory, of young active content creators on the platform eager to work with cultural sector institutions.
Threads
Ah threads… what we were all thinking in early 2023 is ‘what I could really do with is another social media platform…’ 😑
Where did it come from?
As previously mentioned the social media platforms are after users’ attention. They’re after your attention because they can monetize that in the form of ads revenue. Each time you (as a social media user) view an ad, they get paid.
Meta is the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and also WhatsApp (which I haven’t included as a ‘social media’ example here, although in terms of usage it comes in as second worldwide, just after Facebook). So Meta owns a very sizeable chunk of the social media attention market. But that top spot is in competition from these ‘discovery engine’ platforms, like YouTube and TikTok.
TikTok in particular has experienced faster growth than Facebook recently, has much greater depth of engagement (in terms of time spent in the app) and in particular is popular with a young audience (whereas Facebook’s popularity is associated with older demographics). All of which doesn’t look good for Meta’s long term dominance in the ads market.
Enter Threads. Threads is a more direct rival to Twitter/X than to TikTok, but the launch seems to have been motivated by a similar land-grab for dominance in the social space. In particular, the timing of the public release seemed rushed (it went live with no accessibility features or web version, and privacy concerns still prevent it being released in the EU). The launch seemed timed to capitalise on a period of instability at Twitter, rather than around any user need for yet another social platform.
Who’s on the platform?
Threads very quickly acquired 30 million users within 24 hours of launching. This was mainly because it was very easy for users to create a Threads account from their Instagram account, it essentially rode off having an established user base there.
6 weeks later and the number of daily active users had dropped by 80% (to 2.3 million).
However, in the coming weeks the platform has stabilised somewhat and some commentators point out that for current news stories (like the Israel-Hamas attacks) it is a more reliable source of real time news than X currently is. While X has fired almost all of its content moderation team, and allowed anyone to pay for verified / authority status (leading to a proliferation of misinformation), Threads has given free verification to journalists. Similarly while X has hidden link previews, Threads shows the headlines of links.
There’s a convincing argument that Threads could own the void that is what-Twitter-used-to-be. Albeit this time owned by Meta and tied into the ad revenue business.
The platform (unusually) has a male skew; 68%. It is most popular with younger audiences (18-25).
What does this mean for content creators?
Well, as with the other platforms, it’s worth being aware that Meta haven’t exactly been transparent about what they’re doing with all your data, and that grey area is particularly murky when it comes to Threads (and has prevented the release of the app in the EU).
It’s also worth knowing that, much like Hotel California, you can never leave Threads once you’ve joined (without deleting your Instagram account).
It’s really too soon to tell what form Threads will take and what the key opportunities will be for cultural organisations.
At the launch of Threads, most cultural organisation content on the platform were puns on the Threads name:
However some accounts have been doing a great trade in creating more meme based content on the platform and building up a distinct engaged audience, much as you would on other platforms.
Other accounts seem to be taking a more proactive and distinctive stance on the platform, and using a bit like a less monitored version of X (or – how-Twitter-used-to-be-before-your-boss-joined-it):
Ultimately it’s unclear where Threads will go; will Meta try and make it more directly rival TikTok (e.g. by bolstering engagement discovery) or will it try and become like the best bits of old Twitter: a platform for the public to talk openly with those in position of power, barmy memes, and getting up to the minute news?
For now, it’s unclear – and difficult to know how cultural sector accounts can best make use of the platform. It stands to reason that those that build a following now will have an easier time of things if the platform becomes more popular down the line, but there’s also the possibility that it never takes off and that that time is wasted.
Coming up…
In just under two weeks’ time we’ll be presenting the findings from our ‘discovering online collections’ research project.
Here we look at 50 GLAM institutions’ online collections data and derive some overarching insights into user behaviour across online collections platforms; what’s working, what’s lacking and where can organisations go from here…