Khaby Lame today has 24 million followers on Instagram and is officially the Italian king of social networks. Chiara Ferragni is in second place, with 23.9 million. Resounding numbers but not entirely unexpected, given the very rapid growth of the young Piedmontese tiktokter, who in recent weeks has seen his popularity spread enormously.
The real kingdom of Khaby Lame, in reality, is not Instagram, but TikTok, where hers is the third most followed profile in the world, with 74 million followers, right after Addison Rae and Charli D’Amelio, but it is likely that in the over the next few weeks he will also be able to overtake the tiktoker and finish second.
How to become famous on TikTok
In the spring of 2020, Khaby Lame was just a 20-year-old boy who lives in Chivasso, in the province of Turin. Today he is on the front pages of international newspapers for having become one of the most followed Internet personalities in the world. In March of last year, Khaby decides to subscribe to TikTok and to make a series of reaction videos in which, making some very funny faces, he replies to some of the most unique videos on the platform. These videos are very successful, they spread quickly and Khaby begins to accumulate followers.
Khaby Lame’s tips for breaking through on TikTok (and anecdote about the bottle he still uses)
With him, a new generation of influencers was born on TikTok. People, often extremely young, unknown off the platform, who have managed to build a very large following in a short time. There are many, from Charlie D’Amelio to Bella Poarch, and in Italy, besides Khaby Lame, at least Cecilia Cantarano. But how did this happen? How is it possible that virtually unknown kids manage to become reference points for millions of people?
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Flashback
To answer this question it is essential to introduce two very important characters for this story. These are two Chinese guys who, in reality, have little to do directly with our young influencers. But they are the people without whom their success would not have been possible.
- Alex Zhu, a Chinese transplanted to the United States, is a tech entrepreneur. In 2014, together with his colleague Luyu Yang, he created Musical.ly, a platform that allows users to make short videos with effects and background music. Legend has it that the epiphany arrives in a train from San Francisco to Mountain View. Here, he sees a group of teenagers engaged in two activities: taking photos and videos or listening to music. Musical.ly was born from the attempt and the will to combine these two trends.
- Zhang Yiming, on the other hand, is a Chinese boy strongly rooted in his territory, but with the dream of reaching the world. He is the inventor of Toutiao, the service that since 2012 has revolutionized the use of news in China. It is a news aggregator from different sources that suggests articles thanks to a sophisticated artificial intelligence able to evaluate the interests of users and choose the most suitable content for them. It is he, and his company Bytedance, who founded TikTok – the international version of the Chinese Douyin – and took over Musical.ly in 2018, merging the two services.
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Because it is important
This story is not a mere anecdote. It is essential to understand how TikTok works and, consequently, to explain the path to success on the platform.
- Like Musical.ly, TikTok is first and foremost an amazing content creation software. It allows anyone to edit videos, add audio and effects, even without any kind of expertise. Musical.ly first and TikTok then democratized video creation, making what was – and still is, to a large extent – a competence of a few within everyone’s reach.
- Secondly, like Toutiao, TikTok is an excellent content organizer. At the base there is the much discussed algorithm of the ‘For you’ section: just use the platform for a while for it to understand the user’s tastes and propose videos based on his interests. Everything we do on the platform is a test: everything we do provides information to the algorithm which, based on this, provides us with new content in a practically infinite stream.
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But there is more. When launching a new social network, there are at least two obstacles to cope with. And these are obstacles that the more saturated the market becomes, the more difficult it is to overcome.
- The first is data portability. When I decide to stay in a social network, let’s say Facebook, what I do within that platform is not transportable to other digital spaces. In short, my Facebook friends list is only on Facebook and cannot be carried on Twitter, for example.
- A direct consequence of this is the so-called network effect. This is a value – not necessarily numerical – which can be calculated by adding the characteristics of a social network to the number of people who are already on the platform. In other words, the value of a social platform is not determined only by its own feature. It is also a direct function of the number of people registered, the amount of friends or people of my interest that I can find there.
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So what?
We have a new social network like TikTok, with a series of interesting features, which, however, must make its way into a saturated market, with a very large number of platforms with many subscribers. How did TikTok grow to around 1 billion monthly active users?
- First of all, Musical.ly first and TikTok then expanded the range of the network. They turned to a target not necessarily satisfied by the social networks on the market and made up of very young people, at first even under the age of 13 – a case that created some problems, but that’s another story – .
- Secondly, since the merger with Musical.ly, TikTok has invested a lot of money in advertising of all kinds, especially on other social networks, up to the recruitment of influencers from other platforms. In other words, it did not wait for users to arrive: it also went to pick them up in the other digital spaces.
- Ultimately, it created an environment where success was easier. On the one hand, because the platform is designated with these characteristics: the ‘For you’ section potentially allows anyone to reach many people. On the other hand, because TikTok has an obsessive attention to its influencers or potential ones. It is enough to have a hint of growth to be contacted by a representative of the social network who is in charge of following the user and providing him with advice to improve his performance. Alex Zhu, in a 2016 interview, explained that the world of social networks needed an America: a virgin space in which to escape to find new opportunities. TikTok was – and is – exactly that.
Let’s go back to the beginning
So how do you get famous on TikTok from scratch?
- First of all, you need to find a formula suitable for the targets present on the platform and the rules of its algorithm. This correspondence allows those who want to become an influencer to constantly expand their audience and reach an ever higher number of people.
- Second, aspiring influencers find themselves at the heart of a competition within the social platform market. For TikTok, the ability to build influencers is one feature, exactly how and how much the effects or the algorithm, which differentiates it from other social networks and allows it to grow, to compete more effectively. And being good at using this feature to your advantage can make a difference.
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