Understanding TikTok with Ethan Golding

Andrew

So here we are again, back with the ClientSide podcast. This is the first episode of 2022, but if you've been here and tuned into the show before now, then this is in fact our 38th episode. So I'm really grateful that you've taken the time to join me and come back after our winter break. I'm Andrew Armitage, your host, and the podcast is supported by adigital, which is the digital agency here in the UK that I founded. We work with companies to solve the challenges they face with their websites, building content management systems and platform integrations. And in today's show, we're actually talking about something that is still relatively new to me and not something we offer here as an agency and that is using TikTok now. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you can't help but have heard about TikTok videos and the huge growth the platform has seen. TikTok is now the most popular online destination, overtaking Google for a few months last year in 2021. But since August last year, it's actually been consistently the place where people are spending their time online, with the platform now having over a billion active users across the world. Now, from my own limited experience with Tik Tok, it's highly addictive.

Andrew

It's great entertainment, comedy, trash and niche interest all in one. But it is the platform that everyone is talking about, and I wanted to know what it is that makes TikTok so interesting and why people are spending so much time there instead of what we now call more traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. So my guest on the show today is the founder of a start up content creation agency in London. Ethan Golding is just 23 years old, and six months ago he set up his agency called Hustle Studios, where they produce content for businesses to post across LinkedIn and TikTok. Now you might think those two platforms are slightly unusual combination, but Ethan tells me that the fundamentals of creating content for your audience is just the same. Whether it's for the platform, that is all the rage now or whatever inevitably pops up over the next few years. So while Ethan's agency is just six months old, like many of his generation, he's grown up with social media using Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and TikTok for as long as he can remember. So, Ethan, it's great to have you on the Clientside podcast, and thanks for joining me.

Ethan

Thank you. That's a really nice introduction. Yeah, I'm looking forward to having a good conversation.

Andrew

Yeah. Likewise, because Tik Tok is something for me it's relatively new. It's been around for a while,but we keep hearing in the news how it's achieving this astronomical growth. Just before Christmas, we heard in the news that it was now the most popular destination above Google. And you know, we keep hearing these huge volumes of people who have been downloading Tik Tok and getting in on the act, so to speak, during the pandemic. So, you know, just tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into doing what you're doing now and what is it about TikTok that that's sort of drawn you to perhaps specialized? Would you say you specialize in TikTok?

Ethan

It's one of the two platforms we specialize in right now, for sure. I think in terms of backgrounds like often entrepreneurs are older than me. I'm twenty three years old, but the advantage, I guess I had going into what I chose to do, social media, is that I didn't start my agency six months ago when I registered the business. I didn't start the agency two years ago when I quit my job. I started when I was nine and I logged into my first MSN account and spoke to my friends at primary school after we'd all go home. And I made my first Facebook account when I was 11 and were all playing Farmville and checking on our crops every two hours for people to remember that. And it's been a whole journey since then of using Facebook and using Instagram, using Snapchat and using Twitter and eventually migrating onto TikTok.

Ethan

That has meant that when I decided to start using social media to sell for businesses and to markets services, I'd already been at the receiving end of that for a very, very long time. So where someone else starts the social media and they're really starting from square one. I already knew what good content was. I'd already seen the outcome of influencer marketing campaigns already understood how good brands were using social media. And the process for me, it was just working out how do I become one of the people creating content from of people consuming it. But it didn't take me long to work out because it was just kind of something I've grown up using, you know?

Andrew

Sure, sure. Yeah, I think that's one of the big challenges, isn't it? We embrace this social media and we can spend so much time consuming content. But actually, if we want to flip that, we've got to start creating content and we've got to get on the other side. But I suppose there's always that learning curve to begin with, but that's really the product of a misspent youth by the sounds of it for you.

Ethan

Yeah, exactly. I think the content creation. I think it's bigger than social media. Like right now, I'm a social media agency, but the ability to write words and produce pictures and videos that people find engaging and getting those people to take action because of those things, that's like a universal business going, you know, that's existed from newspaper. That's existed from print, that's existed from Tv. Content creation right now exists on social media, and TikTok is a real hot spot of opportunity. But in 24 months, there won't be and there'll be somebody else that comes along and webfree or the Meta r or whatever is coming next. But the ability to make text and image and video interesting to people to watch and engaging, that's a universal business story and it goes wider than social media.

Andrew

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, businesses now have to be publishing houses, don't they? Effectively, everything relates to content one way or another. So whether it's social media, whether it's out on an email channel or on a website or a podcast, audio channels. Ultimately, every business, I believe, has to be a content producer or a publisher. You Know we've got these amazing things in our pocket, haven't we, that we can do so much with. There's no reason not to. There's no excuse not to to say, "Oh,that's not for me", because ultimately it's about your audience and not necessarily you as the content producer.

Ethan

It is. It's incredibly accessible. And I think that. Sometimes we look at something like LinkedIn, for example, people saw LinkedIn is a very, very professional space. So many people, myself included, thought LinkedIn is not for me. It's for business people that do business stuff. It's not for someone young and 23 years old. But a lot of platforms start in a place where they're targeting such a specific audience that it alienates a lot of people. So TikTok starts with 13 year old girls allowed to do viral dances and everyone thinks,Oh, it's just for them. It's never going to be for a 40 year old business owner who wants to market their accountancy service. But then as the platform grows, it becomes less and less about that original target audience and more and more accessible to more people. The fact that more people are searching on TikTok now than Google, the fact that there's over one billion users. The platforms only been around for a couple of years it is definitely going to become bigger than Instagram.

Ethan

It potentially could become bigger than Facebook. It's just earlier on in that lifecycle than the other platforms have been. And if you're someone that is comfortable saying. You know what go on Instagram and I look for a business like mine, there's 20 that exist already. On TikTok there's only one or two. Like, I still got some working out to do. I've got to work out what good content looks like for an accountancy firm, for example. But if you're brave enough to do it early, you capitalize on being the only person doing that on TikTok. Whereas you go to Instagram now, every business has done it all already.

Andrew

It's a crowded space, isn't it?

Ethan

Yeah, exactly.

Andrew

And so what you're saying is that with TikTok still being relatively new, there's a huge opportunity for those that are willing to embrace that technology, maybe even take a little bit of risk with it as well.

Ethan

And every day that opportunity is passing. If I had been smart enough to get on TikTok two years ago when I first heard about it and it was just a 13 year old girls that do viral dances, that would have been the time, that times passed. What's that saying that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago? The second best is now. I wish I'd gotten ticked off from day one. The second best time is like right now because every day that passes, more and more creators come on to the platform that creates more and more competition. And naturally, it means that your videos have to be better. Whereas when I started making TikToks a little while back,I didn't even have to be really that good. Some of them were kind of mediocre. Ok, not particularly well shot, but they performed really well because there just wasn't other competitors in that space.

Andrew

Sure. Yeah. And I think a key point is that those 13 year old girls that you talk about, they're probably now 15, which means they're a slightly different life stage. Obviously, life stages change quite quickly when you're younger, you go through school and then you're potentially looking at college, university into careers and all that sort of thing. And if the platform can keep those people keep that, that level of engagement, then there's lots of different opportunities, I suppose, for different companies and brands to get in on the act and target those different age groups with with different products and services.

Ethan

I agree.I see similar to the point you made at the beginning. I see social media as a really long term investment of if I can work out how to create video content that these people find engaging and I can grow as they grow and over the next five years learn. Even if by some, you know, terrible, terrible situation TikTok turned out to be a complete scam and it disappeared the next day, and it wasn't useful to anyone. The learning I did speaking to that audience over the five years, if it disappears, I still got that.

Andrew

Absolutely.

Ethan

Still translate the things I've been doing as a 9 year old on MSN to TikTok at 23 years old. And the same applies, you know?

Andrew

Yeah, that's that's a really good point. There's still investment in your own personal skills. You know, I myself, as I'm going through TikTok, I'm sort of thinking, am I wasting my time? But actually, if you're posting and creating that content, you're still learning various things, whether it's using your device, whether it's storyboarding, looking at the story as a whole, how you create, how you tell how the imagery that you use in that story, all of that is transferable to other other other areas, isn't it?

Ethan

Yeah. And you learn. You're learning how to listen to people and you're learning how to put something out and see how people react to it and use that information to create a better piece of content. And that learning process, I think, isn't as easily measurable. But it's just a valuable bit of content, a bit of experience as I put a piece of content out. Lots of people saw it and lots of people bought the product, and one of them's about.

Andrew

Ok, so I'm going to ask you. Let's go back to basics and just explain what TikTok is, because I've got to stat here, which says that the amount of time spent on TikTok among UK users has nearly doubled between 2019 and 2020. And that's according to analysis from a platform called App Annie. On Android devices alone, monthly average hours increase from 11 to 19.9, vastly outpacing Facebook's 16.6 hours across 2020 and cementing its place as one of the most rapidly growing apps for entertainment. So just give us a little bit of an overview of what TikTok is. It's short form video that's fairly obvious, but tell us a little bit more about what TikTok is as a platform. Who's using it now? What sort of demographics? What type of content people should be thinking about creating on their.

Ethan

I think that if social media is... A company come along and they find a way to make this thing that you do on your phone, there's really, really addictive when you want to keep scrolling through and watching and it just sucks up your attention. TikTok is like the ultimate innovation in that. Like, I can't think of a better way of building a community of people that create content that people want to watch in terms of the actual way we consume content. Video is the most engaging. It engages, engage with our eyes. And not only is the content engaging, but the algorithm works in a way that all the other social media platforms don't. On Instagram, if you've got one hundred thousand followers and you put out a kind of rubbish piece of content,some people will see it even if it wasn't that good. On TikTok, if you have a million followers and the content is rubbish, zero people will see it.

Andrew

OK.

Ethan

Because the algorithm is purely based on the performance of the content. It checks whether or not it's good. At the same time, you can have zero followers, but you see loads of accounts that have 50 followers. But a video will have gone viral to a million because it was a good video. The algorithm literally checks, you know, I'm going to put the video out to 10 people and then I'm going to rank it based on how many people have watched it, how long they watched it for, how many people liked it, how many people commented, how many people rewatch the video, all the things an algorithm does and then it will rank it.

Ethan

Keep it simple and say 1 to 10. And if it performs like a nine, they'll say, Oh, it's a good video. I show it to 100 people and it repeats the same process. And if you keep scoring high on that ranking, it just keeps going. And it only stops when that ranking becomes so low that right at 10000 views, that video is like a 4/10 now, so I'm going to stop showing it to more people. It means that with no experience and no previous audience, you can get millions of people to see your stuff. My best TikTok video has three quarter of a million views. It took me about 10 minutes to make in my bedroom, and I didn't have any followers at the time, but the content was good. The content was valuable, so I got in front of a lot of people. You can't do that on any other platform. Linkedin is the only one you can kind of do that one. It's a similar algorithm, but nowhere near as powerful as a TikTok.

Andrew

So that's fascinating, so that's pretty much ripped up the rulebook of algorithms, as we know on social media then, so you can basically get viral content without having an audience to begin with.

Ethan

Exactly, and that's what makes it so addictive to watch because the content isn't, oh, this person is popular and it's been put in front of me. The content is this is good. This is the stuff that the algorithm says people are watching people are engaging with. And so the stuff you see, that's why people spend so much time on it because it's purely what the algorithm is ranked the highest. And so you just keep watching it because it's the the curated stuff.

Andrew

It's the best of the best. It's the best of the best content that you're seeing. There's they've put this sort of layer in place that almost stops bad content getting through to people.

Ethan

Exactly that.

Andrew

Right! Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, because you see these huge sort of numbers on on some of the videos, you know, likes,you know, you can see some popular tweets and things like that. And of course, some go truly viral, and get hundreds of thousands of likes or retweets. But actually, there seems to be a lot more of that on on TikTok. And I guess that's, you know, you've just explained it. It's because literally they are saving the best of the best out of all the content that gets fed through to to individual feeds.

Ethan

Yeah, exactly, I mean the drawback of TikTok is that 50 followers say a thousand followers on Tiktok are not as valuable as a thousand followers on Instagram.

Andrew

Right. Ok.

Ethan

Because it's much easier to get likes and followers on TikTok.You post a viral video, a million people see it. That doesn't mean you've got a relationship with your audience. It doesn't mean they care about your brand.

Andrew

No

Ethan

It just means that they saw the video. So in terms of brand awareness, undefeated, like if you just want to get what you do in front of lots of people, it just isn't possible to do it anywhere as effectively as TikTok. But you still have to go through that process of building a relationship with an audience. That means that you need to keep hitting those viral videos. You need to consistently deliver valuable content.It's not just I make a wonderful video and those people buy my stuff. You might get a little spike in sales, but it is the same as any other social media platform. Relationship building, persistent building community over a long period of time.

Andrew

Yeah, and by the sounds of it, they're forever raising the bar. So in effect, making it harder to keep that engagement because they'll be constantly benchmarking and measuring through the algorithm in terms of how things are performing, perhaps compared to previous posts as well.

Ethan

Exactly, exactly. It's getting harder and harder by the day. That's not to say it's hard because there's a lot of people making bad content because it's not an easy thing to work out. But for sure, the earlier you get on it, the easier it is because there's just less competition.

Andrew

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.And do you see TikTok as something that is very consumer focused? I mean, it is fundamentally an entertainment platform. Would you agree?

Ethan

I think all social media are entertainment platforms, like, why do we go on Instagram, why do we go on Facebook? We don't go all those things to buy stuff. We go on these things because we're bored at lunch and we want to mindlessly scroll for a bit or we're in bed and we just want to de-stress from the end of the day. And if you, as a smart marketer could find a way of largely entertaining people with a little bit of buy my stuff and you can tap into what they want, they might tap into a little bit of what you want. But I think all social media is designed to entertain you.

Andrew

Sure. Yeah. And obviously, there is a commerce element which is starting to creep in. I think TikTok have done a some sort of partnership with Shopify. From an ecommerce point of view, and we're going to see more social commerce coming on, obviously we can see there are products which are tagged on Instagram posts and things like that. I think the whole idea of being able to go from browsing to buying within social media is definitely going to be something that grows.

Andrew

So by the sounds of it yes, it's an entertainment platform, but it sounds very much more a consumer focused. You know, if a business is going to take advantage of TikTok and capitalize on that reach, it's probably going to be more of a B to C type business than a business to business a company. Would that be something that you've seen in your experience?

Ethan

Yeah, I'd say the only social media platform that really is better for B2B just if you were going to generalise it than to B2C is LinkedIn.

Andrew

Right.

Ethan

Just because it's business people, they generally have more money, they take their careers seriously. They're looking for business people to connect with. Pretty much all the others are going to be easier to do B2C just because that's why they're on Instagram. That's why they're on Facebook. That's why they're on TikTok. They're just people in their bedrooms doing their thing.

Ethan

Whereas LinkedIn, you come on with a certain mindset like you want to develop, you want to learn, you want to connect to people, you want to do business. So for sure, like it's easier to do B2C, it's much easier to understand how you would sell vintage clothes to a 20 year old than it is to understand how you would sell financial services to a four year old. And it doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means that the same of Instagram, you have to just be a little smarter about it, and you have to think about how can I still take into account that people aren't on here to buy stuff. Like my business services. But they're still here and they're paying attention and they want to be entertained. So if my business can find a way of doing that. It is a good opportunity to let them know that, by the way, I'm an accountant or whatever it is that you do.

Andrew

So in effect, we're taking out that whole B2B, B2C type thing. And we're saying, well, look, everyone is human.They're all,we're all human. We all like entertainment. We're all switching to these social channels. And therefore, if there's an opportunity for engagement, even if it's on a more personal level or a completely wacky comedy level or way out, whatever it might be, fundamentally, it's the content that is making the connection with the person, and that's what potentially starts the relationship. And ultimately that can lead in any sorts of direction.

Ethan

Yeah, I completely agree with what you just said. We're all people. We're all on social media. Every person in this coffee shop has a phone. When we use the phone we are effectively using the internet and when we use the internet, we're effectively using social media platforms. So pretty much every person I can see in front of me spends a lot of time on social media. So if you're a business and that's where everyone's eyes are, you want to be on the other end of those eyes. And right now, there's a lot of eyes on TikTok.

Andrew

Sure. Sure. Yeah, it's it certainly seems to be flavor at the moment. And you know, it's interesting. I do, a bit of work with schools and I've stood at the front of the classroom saying which which social platforms are you using? It's not Facebook. They're on Facebook because their parents are on Facebook, and they like getting to Instagram. That's the only reason they're using Facebook. The vast majority are saying, you know, the place they're spending their time is now TikTok. And of course,with those kind of stats, that's enormous growth, isn't it? It's absolutely huge. So are there any particular results that you've seen from where businesses have been using Tik Tok that you thought that's a pretty smart use case, that's a pretty smart way of engaging with with your audience, which companies, in your view, are the ones that are really getting to grips with the sort of the the approach of TikTok, the audience that are hanging out on Tik Tok and actually seeing that turn into positive results?

Ethan

You know, I think sometimes when we look at social media,we look at these people that are very exceptional at it, and they've really found a way to do something super special and super smart. And then we oh, I'd love to do that for my business. But the reality is, for example, someone like Gary Vee, right, he's the king of social media when it comes to I've got a social media agency and I'm the best of social media. He's done an amazing job of building this system that pumps out content across all platforms.

Ethan

But him, being number one, is not recognising the 99 other social media agencies that are doing amazingly on social media, just not in this special, flashy Gary Vee way. So sometimes we look at a company like Ryanair and we go, oh, Ryanair's TikTok is so amazing it is so funny! And that's great. But you don't have to be that brilliant at it to do a good job on TikTok. You can just do some pretty basic, ordinary stuff. I work for a small business, a local sweet shop. And there are some people that are really, really good in that space because it's sweets. You can do such fine and creative things with it, like we don't really do any of that. We keep it quite simple.

Ethan

We go into the shop. We record the policy as we tell a lot of stories about his journey as an entrepreneur and what he's done to build a shop and the dreams, ambitions. And it works. The videos get anywhere from 50 to 250k views. We get a lot of traffic to his website and we sell the products that hegets to sell. We could invest a hella load and come up with some really, really creative, amazing stuff. Within the day I'm not that kind of creative. I'm creative. I can think of video ideas. I'm not the kind of guy that thinks of what Ryanair ought to do with their TikTok. Which is just these really funny sketches that they've got some young person to jump on and do. Like amazing if we can think of that stuff. But I don't think social media is always about coming up with this radical, brilliant idea. It's just about being alright as it. If you can produce 6/10, 7/10 TikToks that show what your business is about,what value adds and tell interesting stories that people want to listen to like that's good enough. You know, we don't need to be the Gary Vees and the Ryanair's of the world.

Andrew

I think there's an authentic level that comes across in the content when you do that kind of thing as well, you can sometimes be a bit too staged and too professional, I think with social media.Yeah, absolutely there's the appropriate use case for that. You know, the corporate video maybe doesn't make great social media content, but I get there's governance and there's compliance and sort of perhaps certain brand values to uphold. But I think the best social content is really where it's a little bit ad hoc. It's a little bit edgy. It's a little bit unexpected, almost. And that definitely comes across in some of the way the content gets produced, I think, doesn't it?

Ethan

Yeah, I think if you look at the TikTok app, it's quite literally been designed so that a human being picks it up and does something.And that's hard for businesses because then you and I have got to think, how do I create a system that allows a human to just pick it up but is actually marketing my business so I'm efficiently producing content and I'm converting those people into customers. But it's designs that some 16 year old goes on it and tries a funny filter on and dances to a trend and then posts. It's not meant to be this big, convoluted. You know, we've got a perfect example I use is you've got football on TV, which is this big dramatic loss of money spent really high production value content. And then you've got people that sit in their bedrooms or a microphone and talk about how bad Arsenal is. And that stuff works, and if they try to do the big high production value stuff, it just wouldn't really make any sense because they're not Sky TV. But the fact that they just said something funny with their mates and the clips are up and put a little 15 second moment on Tiktok like that, that works because that's the way it's designed to be used, you know?

Andrew

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let's be honest, those are on Tiktok. Ok, we talk of these huge numbers like billions of users, you don't have to reach billions of users. It's a numbers game, isn't it? If the more users that are on there, you know, the more likelihood you're just naturally going to get some good reach out of a piece of content if it's past the threshold that TikTok have specified.

Ethan

I agree and getting there is just pure trial and error, like there's no this is how you make a TikTok, you just make ten and most of them are bad, but one of them is like, maybe slightly ok and you try to work out why. And then you make another 10 and two of them are slightly ok. And you do that for a long enough time. Normally, when we have a client, we're going purely organic like no paid. We say it takes about three months for us to learn what good is. And by that point, if you're consistent with it and you're just trying lots different things and you're ok. I understand it's harder for a corporate company to strip away some of those brand values and get a little bit more casual. But if you can kind of settle into what TikTok is asking you to do, which is just relax a little bit and pull out a camera and let it be slightly blurry and mess up some of the words slightly but it feels natural. And do that for three months consistently in most cases, I see people work out what makes good TikTok content.

Andrew

Yeah, and that's just like any marketing sort of campaign that you might try a one off is never going to cut it, is it? You're never going to get that feedback and understand, you know, whether you right how far off the mark you might have been and how you refine it. So just like anything else, it sounds like you've still got to give it that that minimum time threshold to be able to understand the impact of what you've done so far. And I think what I've seen from TikTok as well is, as we talked about a couple of cases here where there's people dancing or commenting about TV, you know, those are very sort of personal and arguably niche conversations that happen within a certain sort of, let's say,community around a perhaps a particular subject. But I've also seen some great sort of other types of content, really it's professional content, but it's not necessarily professional in the way it's delivered. So there's one account which I've seen called Miss Excel. So anyone who's into Excel spreadsheets and the sort of scratching the head, constantly going and looking at YouTube videos, how do I, you know, that's an account which has got loads of stuff clearly for people who are in the workplace, but it's been done in a very fun and very loose and engaging way that perhaps, you know, for someone who's thinking excel likes a bit of a dry subject, bit boring, perhaps, you know, they've kind of brought a boring topic into something and made it quite fun. And you know, she's got huge numbers of followers.

Ethan

Yeah, it's a great example of people say, oh, I couldn't do that on TikTok. But like anything can be done on there. You just got to, you've got to work out how to contextualise what you're doing to that platform. Like if I went on TV and running ads and then run that exact same ad on the radio, it would make no sense because I have to make the ad for TV. I have to make the right ad for radio. And make a slightly different one for the newspaper. And they're all saying the same thing there, the same message. But like, I can't just repeat the same words. You know, I have to be respectful to the context of the thing I'm trying to sell. And it's the same on TikTok. You can have the same brand message. You can be about the same thing. But like, something makes sense on there and some things don't. And it's just taking the time to work out what does a quote unquote TikTok feel like? What does it look like and what does it sound like? As opposed to even like the slight nuance of an Instagram reel, which is just a little bit different, it has a slightly different feeling to it. You have to work out as well, you know?

Andrew

Sure, sure. Yeah. And another account, which I quite like seeing is Dr. Julie Smith, she's a psychologist. Much more professional videos, but very topical around mental health. And, you know, straight away, you can, she's oozing credibility. You know, they're very short, sharp videos clear to the point on the particular topic, they're clearly edited. You know there is some editing going on in there. Theyv'e not just been snapped on a phone and uploaded. But again, it's that type of authoritative content that you feel comfortable that this person is the real deal. You know, they know what they're talking about. They're legitimate. And again, it's just another example of a slightly more professional use case that no doubt she will use to support her career. She's trying to get her message off across, but inevitably, you know, she'll end up on stage. She'll end up on TV. And I know there's been plenty of other people that have been in that kind of situation as well through different types of content. There was the girl from Tesco, I can't remember her name who managed to get onto a West End stage. There's Francis and his Trainspotting. We've seen him on things like Good Morning Britain and so on. So, so yeah, I mean, there's there's just a huge variety of content. And I think, as you say, with it still been relatively early days, it is creating this platform for people to get themselves seen. And all of a sudden they're elevating themselves to new levels or new careers, even that are taking them in all sorts of different directions so still big opportunity.

Ethan

I think the thing to really stress as well is if we look at what's happened with the older platforms like Facebook, Facebook is the first big one to still be here. Initially, it starts by targeting a very specific group. So college students, then it goes really, really well with that so it opens up to a wider audience. Anyone could be on the platform. It encourages organic content to perform really, really well. And ads are really underpriced because it wants to encourage content creators to come onto that platform and create more content. Because if it has great content we hear about these great things on TikTok. Then someone from this podcast goes, oh shit, I want to check out this Miss Excel woman, so amazing. So that process eventually gets us to the point where Facebook is so big that they say, we're a business and we want to start making money. So the organic reach is going to get cut and ads are going to become more and more important. It's still not the end of the world for businesses because a lot of us have big budgets, so we run ads. But then, as ads become more and more common, they become more and more expensive and they become less and less effective for businesses. Right now, a lot of agencies are running Facebook and Instagram ads because that's what they do, not because it's the best thing for their client.

Andrew

Right.

Ethan

They've just done it for 10 years. I just don't get me wrong I'm 23.This is a pure opinion, but I just can't believe that you can do something for ten years and it be the most effective marketing strategy at the time. Things are changing too quickly for that to be the case if Facebook ads came out all those years ago. I just don't believe today they can be the most effective places for you to spend your money in some cases.

Ethan

But for a lot of people, the opportunities are elsewhere. It's just about being brave enough to quickly adapt. We've seen what's happened with Facebook. Tiktok is about halfway through that cycle, but as time passes, the organic reach is going to get worse. More and more people are stepping up to pay to run start running ads. I keep seeing these things on Instagram of businesses saying, we'll start running TikTok ads for you. That's the first time I've seen that. I've seen hundreds about Facebook ads. I'm just starting to see courses about TikTok ads, which means it's beginning. People are starting to recognize that there's an opportunity here and then that fades and then everyone's running to it. Then it's not as good an opportunity and we've got to find the next one.

Andrew

Move to that pay to play, aren't you, then? So it is really just about having the braveness. I mean, you talk about running Facebook ads or Instagram ads for the last 10 years. I suppose it may be better, the devil you know, for some of these brand managers or campaign managers and you know, TikTok is maybe still this unknown quantity. We heard a lot of Donald Trump talking about TikTok and sort of, do we block TikTok because it's data that's all going to China. And so I suppose, you know, there's sort of rhetoric like that that perhaps questions people or forces people to question whether it's the right space, the right place to be seen. I think we're probably over that now, not least because Trump's out of office and you know we don't hear him all the time. But also, we're seeing this huge growth, and we're seeing more people move to it, gravitate towards it. And and as I say, use it as that form of entertainment. So the more people, the more time people are spending there inevitably, advertisers are going to say, actually, now is the time. But as you say, it becomes that pay to play model again.

Ethan

Yeah, I think I mean, I've had this conversation a lot. You know, I thought a lot of people about TikTok. I think I recognize that I'm from a generation that is much more comfortable seeing new technology come out and seeing like, Oh shit, this is it, but only for a little bit. Like Vine came up for a year. Logan Paul is probably one of the most, if not the most famous YouTuber in the world, and it's because he did really well on that Vine platform. So we've seen how something new comes out. Everyone says it's not that good, but enough people are talking about it that it clearly is going to be good even for a little while, and we're going to jump on it for two years and move on to something else. I think people that are running businesses, the kind of people I work for, they're 40, 50 years old. Things moved a lot slower in the time that they started their businesses. So they're not used to something like TikTok being good for like three years and then not being good anymore or like Nfts are coming out. There's like an opportunity and then there's just not. And so I'm comfortable being good at something for two years and then learning something new and bigger businesses are slower to. Oh is it a good idea? We'll think about it. Could we possibly. And then the opportunity is gone.

Andrew

And that may well be a demographic thing as well. You know, you're 23. I'm 43, so I'm twenty years older. I've perhaps got different responsibilities in my life to you, and we all get to a stage where we we perhaps look for that comfort, don't we? We maybe don't feel as brave as we once did. I mean, would I start a business knowing that just coming out of a pandemic and people all working from home, I'd probably think twice about it, although of course, it depends on the situation that I was in. But at some point 12, 13 years ago, I did.I felt I was able to take that leap and I was able to move forward with it. But I guess it's that feeling of change and the particularly the pace of change because you say TikTok might be a completely different beast in just two or three years time. And things not only do you have to embrace them quickly, but you've also got to be prepared to move on to the next thing pretty quickly as well.

Ethan

Yeah, exactly. I agree. And yet, don't get me wrong, I know I'm going to be on a podcast in 20 years time and someone's going to be telling me something about where 4.0 and I'm going to be going hmm I don't know.I get it's just a process that people go through. But I do think it's a really good opportunity, and I'm definitely giving my agency to I call it a social media agency to other people because I need my client to digest what I do for them. But we're not a social media agency. The people that know how to create content that people watch and engage with that drive business and also people. Right now that is social media. I'm confident that in five years time, it just won't be. It will be something in the Meta. It's going to be marketers they're on Web 3.0 and their journey will just continue, you know?

Andrew

But fundamentally, there's still content that's going to drive it, and it's just the distribution and the output, the format, perhaps, which is going to vary. But you know, we're drilled we as kids, we listen to stories. Stories are such a huge part I think right through our life, they help us to contextualise stuff. And if we're still telling stories but the medium is slightly different, then that's a skill that's not going to go away, is it?

Ethan

Yeah, I agree, I agree I had someone on LinkedIn asked me, I mean, I've been doing quite well on LinkedIn, only started my account like two months ago for myself. I was doing lots for clients, so I decided, you know what I need to do on my own social media. And someone asked me, like, how would you write good stories? And I think when you look at me, come onto LinkedIn and then two months in, I mean, if anyone checks my account after this,and thinks wow he has only been on it for two months. But I haven't. I've been on it for a very, very long time. I've been working out. I posted at least one piece of content every single day for the last two years. How to write stories. And I've been consuming them all my life since I was nine, like I said. So I write stories by just like trying. I write lots of bad ones like lots and lots of ones that make no sense and no one engages with. But just over time, you just get a feel for how to communicate with people. And this is the point I'm reiterate about TikTok.

Ethan

Maybe I'm too late. I'm not. But let's play devil's advocate. Maybe I'm too late for TikTok, and you know, I'm going to write a bunch of stories on there, and no one's going to watch them because there's too much competition. But I'm going to learn how to tell a story, and you can see how Facebook made TikTok. You can see how Instagram made TikTok and TikTok is going to make something else. You can see how Vine, Vine literally was TikTok. It was the same thing, but it didn't take off in the same way. Maybe it's a bit too early, but it's going to make the next one. So if I can learn to be good at this one, even if a little bit late and I kind of miss the opportunity when the next one comes, it's the same skill.

Andrew

You're still priming yourself for that next time, which is inevitable, isn't it?

Ethan

Agreed.

Andrew

Yeah, great. Well, Ethan, it's been really interesting talking about it, I mean, I've still got to get my head into TikTok a little bit more. I've been there very much as a spectator. I've wasted a lot of time. I've learned a few things, though, certainly from some accounts. I never knew I was such into trains. Francis and his Trainspotting friends seem to pop up all the time for me, but I'm not quite sure where that's come from. But before we break up, so tell me a little bit about your agency and tell me where, tell our listeners where people can get in touch with you. I'm curious as well. You mentioned that you work with two platforms. What's the other platform that you work with alongside TikTok.

Ethan

Linkedin for similar reasons.

Andrew

Right!

Ethan

As as a platform, it's been around since 2002. It's one of the oldest as a content creation social media space. It's only been around for a few years. So exact same process. They want to encourage organic reach. They encourage content creators like me to come along. I've been on there two months, so I'm getting like 30000 people seeing my stuff. This just ridiculous numbers I would never get on Instagram or Facebook. The opportunity is there for 24 months, so I'm going to try to take advantage and then I'll be on to the next one. So TikTok, if you're B2C brave, willing to make a lot of mistakes and look kind of stupid, but learn it, LinkedIn if you're a business guy and maybe it is a little bit more comfortable for you because it's a bit easier to work out, but those are the two I'm 100% focused on.

Andrew

Excellent. Excellent. And your agency was called Team Hussle. Is that right?

Andrew

Yeah. Team Hustle. We spoke Hustle H.U.S.S.L.E because I wrote Team Hustle the correct way to someone who is dyslexic one time, and he spelled it wrong. And I kind of liked how it looked, so I just kind of kept it that way.

Andrew

Probably easier to get the domain name registered as well.

Ethan

Say again

Andrew

Probably easier to get the domain name registered as well.

Ethan

Exactly! I looked at the team hustle that one was like seven grand.I wasn't ready for that yet. But yeah, we're a social media agency. We specialize in organic content and all the things I said just now we work out how to tell stories and take advantage of where we're going to put a piece of content out. And not a lot of people are doing the same. So lots of people are going to see our stuff right now, LinkedIn and TikTok. I'm confident if five years it won't be, we'll be. We'll be in another space.

Andrew

Still telling stories, though. Fantastic, so we can put your links in on the show notes, which we put onto our website, we'll put your LinkedIn, where can people find you? Where's the best place for people to look you up if they want to follow up with you?

Ethan

Linkedin is a spot right now. Very active every day, talking to people a lot. Shoot me a message. Respond to some wire content. If you do any of those things I will reply.

Speaker3

Great stuff, we'll say we'll put those in the show notes. Ethan, it's been an absolute pleasure. I've really enjoyed the conversation with you. It's clearly early days for you. You know your stuff evidently. I wish you the very best of luck over the next few months, as things no doubt start and ramp up in the new year and with whatever follows after TikTok, LinkedIn and whatever else that comes along. So thanks for your time, Ethan. Really appreciate it. And like I say, I wish you all the best.

Ethan

Awesome, man. Thank you for having me on. That was my first podcast and I really, really enjoyed that. You made me comfortable and we had a good chat, so I appreciate it.

Andrew

So thank you to Ethan for talking to me today about TikTok this afternoon. The platform is definitely going through a stage of people jumping on the bandwagon to see what it's all about. And as Ethan said, there is still that opportunity to carve out a niche and a name for yourself. While the platform continues on this huge growth journey, it will, like all the other platforms, see its business mature and as a result will almost certainly become a to pay to play platform like Facebook and Instagram have over the years. I've got to be honest, I'm still to be convinced by TikTok as a place to create awareness or brand reach for some types of businesses. It does ultimately come down to the content you're prepared to share. We've talked about some unlikely successes on the show today, but as we've always said here on the podcast, putting your audience front and center is the key to creating great content that reaches the parts to deliver positive results. I think TikTok is the platform more than anything else that demands a certain level of risk to get your content seen. But with audience growing exponentially, the opportunity for success shouldn't be easily dismissed. So that just about wraps up today's show. I hope you found it an interesting conversation with Ethan. We'll add his details and some of the TikTok profiles we've talked about to the show notes page on our website. Alongside the written transcript, which you'll be able to find at adigital.agency/podcast. Next time, on the client side, we're going to be talking about cyber security, which has been a huge threat to businesses, especially through the pandemic. The need for companies to manage their security, whether it's on their website, internal policies or culture is greater than ever. So I'm looking forward to getting back on more familiar territory in our next episode in a few weeks time. Don't forget, you can leave us a rating in Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. I'd love to get your feedback. Please share the show on your social media channels, and if you want to get in touch and just drop me an email to hello@clientside.show. So that's all for today. I'll see you in a couple of weeks time. Have a great week. Cheers.