All the big tech companies are laying off en masse. All? No: TikTok wants to increase staff

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The digital media The Information published on November 16 that TikTok was planning to double the staff of the offices located in the San Francisco Bay Area, until reaching approximately 2,000 workers. That same day, Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, was asked at a forum hosted by Bloomberg in Singapore about the mass layoffs at Twitter. Chew replied that he hoped it never got to that point, saying that the company’s organization is such that they don’t need to lay off half the workforce to achieve desired levels of efficiency.

In other words, while Big Tech is carrying out significant downsizing to adapt to recent changes in the economic landscape, TikTok is doing the opposite.continuing the path started in the pandemic: according to a LinkedIn analysis cited by Business Insider, in 2020 the number of workers specialized in business development increased by 483% compared to the previous year, and that of the marketing department did so by 143 %.

In addition, the number of employees in the United States went from 1,824 in December 2019 to 4,413 in June 2020. The Chinese social network thus shows that it has become a tough competitor for Silicon Valley firms.

climbing positions. The Statista portal, based on the number of active users per month, published in July a ranking of the most popular social networks worldwide. Facebook topped the list, followed by YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, WeChat and TikTok. This last application, despite being the sixth in the ranking, has achieved great successes in recent years: between 2018 and 2020, it experienced an 800% increase in US users, and in 2021, tiktok.com was the most popular web domain. popular, unseating Google, according to Cloudfare.

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Kids don’t search on Google. In addition, TikTok is, along with Instagram, the most popular search engine among young people. Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Google, stated at a conference held last July that the company’s studies indicated that 40% of young people, when looking for a place to eat, do not use Google Maps: they use TikTok or Instagram .

The most used by young people. And it is that the secret of TikTok is its popularity among the youngest: Observer calculates that 80% of its users belong to Generation Z and Millennials. But the Chinese social network is succeeding specifically among ‘Gen Z’: according to a Forrester study, American adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 used TikTok more times a week than Instagram in 2021.

Facebook crash. In fact, since 2014, the use of TikTok among American teenagers has grown remarkably, becoming the second most used application after YouTube, while the use of Facebook has collapsed, according to Pew Research.

Goal Alert. Therefore, the concern of Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, regarding the popularity of the Chinese social network is understandable. Last February, Mark Zuckerberg reported the loss of users in the last quarter of 2021, the first in the company’s history, and pointed to the rise of TikTok as the main reason for what happened. However, Zuckerberg had already seen the wolf’s ears before: in August 2020, Instagram introduced reels, a new short video display tool modeled on the one used by TikTok.

a dubious patch. However, the reels account for only 20% of the time spent on Instagram, which is a problem since the remaining 80% does not generate the same benefit, as reported by the journalist Javier Ruiz recently on Cadena Ser.

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good horizons. According to Statista, Bytedance, the company that owns TikTok, made $58 billion in profit in 2021, an increase of almost 69% compared to the previous year. Also in June, Bloomberg reported that by the end of this year, Bytedance could triple revenue, if so, continuing its tremendous growth.

Questions. Therefore, it seems that TikTok is on the right track, and that it has sane for a while, despite the fact that this raises doubts about its policy to combat misinformation. Time will tell if, finally, the Chinese social network manages to dominate the social networking market and what the consequences will be if it does.

Image: Solen Feyissa/Unsplash