Adobe has announced a new partnership alongside Netflix called ‘The Great Untold’, giving new creators the chance to bring their stories to life. Artists can pitch their story ideas via TikTok, where three submissions will be selected and made into featured films on the Netflix platform. If chosen, the featured participates will receive a $10,000 grant, access to expert tools, and a solid mentorship network to help on the process. This collaboration isn’t exactly new and builds on the long-standing tradition of businesses exploring social media for talent. Huge success stories are found in these events like Scooter Braun discovering 13-year-old Justin Bieber on YouTube or The Wall Street Journal turning Tweets into full-blown stories. TikTok seems to be the next step in this ongoing collaboration, giving legitimacy behind independent creators. If ‘The Great Untold’ program wasn’t enough to incentivize TikTok stars to create more content, then the upcoming reality show offers will really promote collaborations. TikTok’s Hype House, which consists of some of top streamers on the social media platform, will get their own Netflix reality show to discuss how they interact. Will TikTok continue to use these platforms to its advantage when Vine failed to do so? I reached out to Helena Stephen, a local TikTok creator who has garnered over 363,000 likes on the app, to discuss what can be expected to come from the platform.
A 30-year-old Texas mother impersonated her 13-year-old daughter and snuck into her middle school to demonstrate the importance of school security. This was documented through TikTok, which has amassed millions of views. What TikTok trend do you think has been the most toxic and is it any worse than what we’ve seen in past social media trends?
In my opinion, there are two main topics that I feel like always have some toxic trends going on, especially on TikTok. Every few weeks or so, it seems like there’s a new trend revolving around couples playing pranks on each other to pretend like they’re cheating. I get that it’s funny, but it’s also very hurtful to people who have been through it as their reality and not a joke, and I can’t even imagine how it affects the relationship of those who posted it, if it wasn’t staged. Another toxic social media trend is the whole fitness body image side of TikTok. People post a lot of transformations of how their bodies have changed over the course of the last year since the pandemic started, which don’t get me wrong, it’s AWESOME! Unfortunately, there have been a lot of people that have been going through the worst times of their life since COVID hit, then having to acknowledge the fact that they didn’t progress because of their own personal issues is hard. I have heard and seen people in comments say things about how it just makes them feel worse that they didn’t do much to work on themselves, and again granted there was a lot going on because of the pandemic. I don’t know if it’s worse than anything in the past, but it does seem like it’s seen more often than not on TikTok.
Around the end of 2015, Vine had 200 million active users. This highly valued membership base didn’t stop Twitter from disabling uploads around 9 months later. Do you think TikTok has a brighter future compared to Vine and is there anything unique about the platform that makes it more successful?
I think TikTok is still going to be around for a while. Last year they kept saying that the app was going to be banned and people would lose all their content and collaboration deals, but over half a year later, it’s still alive and getting more attention every day. I think the unique thing is that anyone can go viral at any point, which is why I suddenly have so many followers now and have had random videos that have gotten over 100,000 views! It still really blows my mind. I don’t fully understand how the algorithm works, but anyone with 2 or 2000 followers can show up on your page. In comparison to Vine, the short 6 seconds clips seemed to be more comedy content, where TikTok reminds me more of YouTube, but shorter, and easier to keep people’s attention.
Twitter is launching a paid model in Canada, which would give options like undoing a tweet or easily reading a long thread. These added features would cost $3.50 monthly and will roll out to additional markets throughout the year. Would there be any interesting features that would be willing to pay for on TikTok?
My number one feature I would 100% pay for on TikTok is if there was some way we could save/like videos but save them into a specific folder. For example, I see a variety of TikToks I like, and will heart them to save them for later like recipes, fitness, comedy, makeup, etc. Later when I go to look for it, I have to scroll through everything I have saved to come back across a video, and I have liked way too many videos on the app for it to be a simple task.
36% of younger millennials have stated that they want to go viral. YouGov Profiles Data has also shown that 75% of younger millennials are the most likely to use social media to keep up with people and share news with friends. Is there any advice you would give to someone young who might be receiving a shocking amount of attention all at once due to a video going viral?
I don’t have the biggest following, but it’s a lot bigger than I would have ever expected. One thing I would say so far from my experience of having a few videos go viral is that people just always like to say something. They don’t HAVE to say something, but for some reason they always do. For example, one of my first videos that went viral was about a Taco place in Dallas. On that video, there’s tons of comments on there just bashing the food, or me for recommending it because their food wasn’t good, and just a lot of negativity. Even though I just wanted to share my experience and how cool the place looked. I did not understand why those people didn’t just go leave a yelp review or something. But, when you get notifications of people commenting stuff like that on your page, even though they’re strangers. it still makes you feel some type of way. I would say not to let other people’s opinions affect you, which is easier said than done. Especially since younger generation is growing up now in this social media age, this is all they know, so comments from strangers on the internet mean a lot more to people than they realize. At this point I just ignore all negative comments.
