How TikTok conquered fashion

Joseph Altuzarra doesn’t consider himself very good at social media.

The designer has posted on Instagram for years, but he says he wants to think about what he shares. Recently, it has been captivated by TikTok, known for its addictive short videos and youth communities with highly specialized fanbases. Altuzarra was only a spectator on stage until June, when a personal chef cooking for his family in the Hamptons during the summer went viral on stage. Chef Meredith Hayden was amazed at how quickly her audience grew and how off-the-cuff her videos were. She encouraged him to try it himself.

“It wasn’t, ‘Oh, you have to post [at] If you want a good audience this time,’” Altuzarra said. He felt there was “a lot less pressure to make things work or be good” because the app’s way of showing videos to viewers is somewhat random. He also enjoyed being part of the stage.

“I find it more interesting from a creative perspective than Instagram,” he said.

Altuzara is one of the millions of users who have been scammed by TikTok in recent years. TikTok will remain the most downloaded app in the world in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, according to data from app tracker Sensor Tower. And Tik Tok users are spending more time every year. But the app still trails rivals like Instagram and Facebook in terms of total audience, ranking fifth globally in terms of monthly active users, according to Data.i. Tik Tok is expected to account for only a third of the influencer marketing dollars brands will spend on Instagram this year, although it is on track to surpass Facebook and take the No. 2 spot from YouTube by 2024, according to Insider Intelligence.

For most of Tik Tok’s growth, the fashion and beauty communities used the platform as a testing ground when building their online marketing campaigns around Instagram. no longer. Meta’s recent promises to feature more videos and recommended content in Facebook and Instagram feeds show how much TikTok has disrupted the social media landscape. And as more users see changes in the apps they grew up with, brands and influencers are rethinking where to focus their efforts.

“TikTok is where trends start,” says Stacey McCormick, senior vice president of marketing for Aerie, the American Eagle sister close friends and activewear brand.

Influencers who built their careers on carefully curated Instagram posts are also embracing the new reality.

“If we’re looking at it from a business perspective and just from pure economics and eyeballs, I don’t see how a creator can just keep posting. [Instagram] Food,” said Vanessa Flaherty, president of Digital Brand Architects of Influence (DBA). “It’s a dying breed at this point.”

Before the pandemic, Instagram was the dominant platform for fashion and beauty, replacing print magazines as the source of trends and personalities driving the industry.

But if Instagram is description magazines, TikTok is television. Compared to TikTok’s silly, chaotic, and personable videos (and the videos that viewers want to see next), Instagram strikes some users as overly commercial and artificial. For many, Instagram simply isn’t as fun as it used to be.

“TikTok has been successful because it’s everything Instagram isn’t,” Brian Gray Yambao said in a WhatsApp message. The popular fashion and style blogger Brianboy, also known as Brianboy, is popular on Tik Tok and has given up the luxurious lifestyle he used to candidly portray on Instagram.

Instagram is struggling to adapt to the TikTok-ification of the internet, along with a broader decline in online advertising spending. In July, parent company Meta reported its first revenue decline since going public. Meta’s proposed plan is seen as a direct response to TikTok’s popularity to show more recommended content to Facebook and Intsagram users on accounts they don’t follow, especially video content. But frustrated users and influencers are reporting that posts from friends and celebrities they chose to follow have disappeared.

Meta executives expect Instagram and Facebook to balance their primary functions as social networks and discovery platforms. However, as consumer backlash peaked last week, CEO Adam Mosseri released a video statement explaining the strategy changes. “We are temporarily reducing the number of recommendations you see in your feed so that we can improve the quality of your experience,” the company said later. But the general strategy remains the same.

Instagram’s conversion strategy poses a dilemma for fashion brands. Instagram is still where most customers are, and companies have experience turning marketing spend into brand awareness and sales. But user frustration with the app’s algorithm raises questions about its future relevance. Meanwhile, Tik Tok’s influence is growing rapidly. The app is more than viral dances.

Brian Vaughan, partner at Shadow, said: “TikTok represents a fusion of innovative ideas and emerging cultural trends. The creative marketing and communications agency has worked with brands such as Aerie, Express and elf Cosmetics.

And TikTok is no longer just a destination for teenagers.

“Millennials — they may not be creating as much, but they’re consuming content,” he said.

Amy Song is one of those millennials. The longtime fashion influencer, who launched a clothing line in 2019 and is represented by DBA, has been online long enough to remember MySpace and Zhang. She now counts over 6 million followers on Instagram and another 84,000 on TikTok. Song is still getting used to posting fashion show footage on Tik Tok where she mixes in silly videos of her family. She was surprised by the new people she met on TikTok, including Jim Ta, a 61-year-old former fashion executive.

“I never met her on Instagram,” Song said. “You only offer to wear clothes without clothes.”

Meanwhile, on Instagram, Song has been posting more videos to increase her chances of appearing on her followers’ feeds.

“It’s not really supernatural, like, OK, I have to because if you don’t go with the program, you’re going to be left behind,” she said.

While Instagram is under threat, it’s outdated. In the year By the end of 2021, CNBC reportedly had more than 2 billion monthly active users worldwide (Meta does not regularly release Instagram user numbers). And as tensions between the two countries escalate, TikTok’s Chinese ownership could complicate its future in the US.

For many brands, Instagram is still seen as the best place to drive actual sales, while TikTok is best for brand awareness. (Certain items can go viral on TikTok, and it’s difficult to predict or engineer that kind of response.) Instagram has been building and tweaking its in-app marketing function for years, even as TikTok looks to catch up. The app is testing various in-app purchase products outside of the US.

“People always say Instagram is taking a page out of the TikTok playbook, but I think TikTok is probably doing the same thing in terms of shopping and doing business on their platform,” Flaherty said.

Instagram is still a channel for many brands to hire influencers like Song for sponsored content, especially in the luxury and designer categories. Her audience there is older and more likely to drop several hundred dollars on a designer bag. Her audience on TikTok often has very little knowledge or interest in fashion, she said.

Eric McCormick says the brand thinks of its Instagram account as a brand billboard. Customers ready to buy from a brand often head to the Instagram account before the website, she said. On Tik Tok, where users are less likely to search for the brand’s content, Ari’s strategy is to create more awareness by hiring creatives and running ads that reach a wider audience.

“If you want to take a message and communicate it to as many people as possible, you can do that in a process [TikTok]” said McCormick.

Vaughn agrees that the “beauty-focused content” that Instagram is known for is still valuable to brands.

“This also has a place in marketing,” he said.

Former influencer Emily Oberg, who started her outfit Sporty & Rich from an Instagram mood board, isn’t interested in shooting “do-it-yourself videos” for TikiTalk. The accounts she follows still appear on her Instagram feed.

“I’m very happy that I’ve limited all social media use and will limit it even more as I get older,” she said in an email. “I feel good and I don’t want any involvement in where the content goes.”