The Next Frontier of Search: TikTok As A Social Search Engine

We’re often told as marketers to stop thinking about digital channels in terms of siloes, that everything works together to create a unified customer experience. 

While that may be universally true, that doesn’t stop us from thinking about the specific channels that we work on. But what happens when a platform becomes something else entirely? Say, when a social media platform actually becomes a search engine?

The Evolution of Social

Since the first platform was launched, social media has primarily been used as a tool for connection and communication. How that’s always translated to marketing is “awareness”, relegated to the top of the sales funnel. Most people operated on the assumption that social worked like this:

Social Media → Website → Owned Channel (Email) → Conversion

In reality, this is too simplified and doesn’t account for the nuances that come with the user journey. Think about how you search for anything – does your own process look like this? Probably not. In reality, most users follow a journey that looks more like this:

Direct → Social Media Ad (IG) → Google Ad → Direct → Organic Content (TikTok) → Organic Search → Direct → Conversion

That’s a significant difference to the journey that many marketers have been working from. So when social no longer stays in the upper part of the sales funnel, how does that impact the type of content we need to be creating? 

We need to acknowledge that social media now forms a key part of the search process, at various points in the customer journey and through several different avenues. Both organic and paid content is vital in the overall path to conversion and content must be shaped around this to be successful.

What Do Businesses Really Want From Search Engines?

Before we dive into the specifics of how TikTok has become crucial in search, let’s quickly recap the two major goals that businesses want out of a search engine.

First, more SERP coverage. There’s a reason that clients and SEOs alike are still so fixated on rankings, first page results, and coming up in Featured Snippets or Maps results. Businesses want to appear where customers are going to find them, whatever those queries might look like.

And from that increased SERP coverage, businesses naturally want to make more money. That’s not an exclusive goal just for search engines; businesses want to see more sales, no matter the source of the traffic. But when you’re going after, and getting, a good amount of SERP coverage, you want to see that translate into cold hard cash for your company.

If we stay focused on those two key goals, TikTok can now fulfill both as a search engine, rather than simply a social connection tool.

Using TikTok As A Search Engine

We know that TikTok’s rise as a search engine is ruffling a few feathers at Google. At the beginning of July, their Senior Vice President, Prabhakar Raghavan, openly shared that 40% of young people surveyed now use TikTok or Instagram to find a lunch spot over Google Search or Maps.

It seems hard to believe. How can anyone find something that specific through a social media platform? But after years of attention spans growing shorter and general distrust in Google SERPS (who else is tired of reading a recipe blogger’s life story before getting to the actual point of the post?), Gen Z are turning to short-form video content over written text to get the information they need as quickly as possible.

The in-platform search functionality of TikTok serves as a closed loop discovery system. Content here feeds every step of the user journey, from the top-of-funnel awareness stage, all the way through to search and conversion. That’s why creating content that fits this model is so crucial. Whatever the next step in the customer journey looks like, it must be accounted for efficiently.

Looking Beyond TikTok Assumptions

For any marketer who works with TikTok, we’ve probably all heard the same assumptions about the platform at least a handful of times.

1. “It’s just teens doing dances.”

Statistically speaking, that’s no longer true. TikTok is continuing to age up and it’s no longer just Gen Z and Alpha dancing their days away online.

2. “We can’t make money there.” 

Also not true. Businesses both big and small have seen monumental success through advertising on TikTok. A cosmetic client of TVG saw a 40% year-over-year increase in product sales and were the #1 serum on Amazon throughout our TikTok ad campaign.

3. “Young people don’t have money to spend.”

The average household income for a TikTok user is around 5-7% higher than the national average. Sales of luxury goods have increased as a result of TikTok content, as the prevalence of these products in videos is reasonably high. As the audience on the platform continues to mature, this is only likely to increase.

4. “TikTok isn’t a serious ad platform.”

Plenty of companies are making more on TikTok than any other advertising platform. This is one of the biggest assumptions that is simply not true.

Not only is TikTok a lucrative opportunity for advertising, it also comes with a number of features that offer in-platform search potential. 

Trending audio, effects, and hashtags all offer creators the chance to have their content seen by thousands of users. 65% of Gen X+ TikTok users report that they’ve found both new brands and products through the app.

Top content and creator search results also put new and interesting content in front of TikTok users, giving these channels even greater opportunity for exposure on a mass scale. And with 88% of users stating that they plan to use the app more in the future, now is the time to get onboard.

BookTok: How Self-Referenced Language Is Changing Search Results

Unless you’ve avoided the internet for the better part of the last year, you’ve heard of BookTok. And it’s not the only self-referencing trend to have come out of TikTok either. DanceTok, CookTok…you name it, there’s a TikTok subtopic for it.

Self-referenced language is all about creating an exclusive “belonging environment” – like the nickname only your siblings call you, it’s language that only those within the community use that’s unique to that group. 

This language generates a vast ecosystem of other possible searches around the same topic. For BookTok, this can be anything from trending books and must reads to genre-specific recommendations. Positioning yourself within that ecosystem is how your content is found by new users.

So how does this compare to a traditional Google search? While Google’s semantic language features have improved, they’re still trying to catch up to the higher level of understanding that TikTok shows to its users. When we look at the results pages, Google is still fairly general compared to the intelligent results that come from TikTok.

TikTok has definitely been inspired by Google, with similar features like “People also search for”, suggested content, and similar language searches. But they’ve gone one step further and improved the experience for users with the results they actually show.

A Peak Behind The TikTok Curtain

How is TikTok making this happen though? It all comes back to the closed-loop model.

Their machine learning is heavily focused on topic clusters, which makes it much easier for the results to populate similar, relevant content when someone searches. By working under such tight relevancy restrictions, TikTok users are able to find what they’re looking for much more easily and quickly compared to a Google search. 

It’s no wonder, then, that so many of them are turning to TikTok for their search needs. And it’s time that we start thinking about TikTok as a search engine because of it.

Populating TikTok Results In Google

Looking outside of the TikTok app itself, we’re also starting to see how important this content is in traditional search. As with anything SEO, this is new and always changing. But for the moment, this is how indexing of TikTok videos works.

TikTok content is currently listed under “short videos” on mobile or “related searches” on desktop. There are a handful of optimization tactics that you can use to try to get your TikTok videos ranking on Google. 

1. Think about your display name and bio. Keep this closely tied to your content topic to improve relevancy.

2. Thematic content and consistency are performing better than the recency of your video and the view count. Think in topic clusters.

3. Use keywords in your video captions. You don’t need to use “TikTok” as one of them, but you can use self-referencing phrases like “booktok” if they’re relevant.

4. Google appears to take cues from playlist content, as well as in-platform rankings and popularity. Focus on building your TikTok audience first and optimize for Google search second.

Let’s look at an example. Rich Mom Tinx ranks well for a number of different phrases, for both her real name and TikTok handle, within Google after her popularity grew on TikTok. 

Not all of the search results are her most popular videos, though. Most are based around thematic consistency. This means that some of her older content, like a NYC video from December 2020, still performs well in search results nearly two years later.

We all know that Google makes changes every day. Trends move fast and happen in real time, so staying on top of what’s new in SERPs is important. Audio indexing hasn’t caught up to Google yet, so the content of your videos still needs to be the focus. 

As with any new social platform, there’s a high expectation of “instant success” and you’ll hear plenty of “we need to go viral on TikTok like *insert unrelated creator or industry here*.” There’s also still platform and user assumptions that you’ll need to contend with when pitching content ideas for TikTok. Doing your research before making any videos is going to be crucial in finding any success on the app.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Ultimately, traffic without conversions mean nothing for businesses. Content can go viral, you can rack up hundreds of thousands of views…but with no sales coming from that, it’s not always worth it. Instead, focus your content around generating real leads, not just views. And remember, be search agnostic – even if that means adapting to something other than Google.