The year 2020 has been a massive year for the Chinese short-form video app TikTok. After being one of the top 4 global apps for two years in a row, TikTok finally came for the crown, becoming the most downloaded app worldwide in 2020. This success was recorded despite TikTok’s ban in India, its largest market outside of China.
With this overwhelming success, TikTok inadvertently ended up becoming a hub for influencer marketing like all the other social media giants it’s been competing with.
Ad Age named TikTok the marketer of the year for 2020. In Q3 2020, TikTok was the top grossing non-gaming app globally, with an 800% Y-o-Y growth in consumer spending.
While influencer marketing has become an extremely common term now, many might not know what it exactly entails or how influencers amass so much wealth. To shed some light on the matter, Business Insider came through with a piece detailing how much influencers might earn for doing brand promotions on TikTok.
Bigger Follower Count, Bigger Deals
Like influencer marketing on most other platforms, brands generally place bigger bets on accounts with a larger reach.
Lindy Goodson, whom Business Insider interviewed in August 2020, at which time she had 67,000 followers, reported charging brands anything between $150 – $250 per video.
In contrast, Alexa Collins, a full-time social media influencer who has a massive reach even on other platforms, reported charging $500 per post.
The figures soar right into the thousand dollar bracket for influencers with over 1 million followers. For instance, Dana Hasson charges between $3000 and $6000 for sharing sponsored content with her 1.7 million followers. On the other hand, for JJ Yosh, who had 2 million followers at the time of the interview, entering into slightly more long term deals of $10,000 and $50,000 was the norm.
Lastly, Alan and Alex Stokes, the “twinfluencers” with more than 15 million followers on TikTok, get paid in “the low five-figures” for a single sponsored video.
Promotion Bundles
Apart from TikTok promotions, some deals also require the influencer to promote the product on other platforms. Most commonly these are Instagram and YouTube.
Such deals are best categorized as promotion bundles wherein the terms include posts of various different kinds depending on the platforms chosen. “They’re doing bundles now because they want to take advantage of each platform,” Alexa Collins told Business Insider.
Dana Hasson, who disclosed that she charges extra for sharing a TikTok video to her Instagram story, told BI that “TikTok is not on the same level with how much brands will pay on Instagram. Brands will pay way more for 1 million Instagram followers than they would for TikTok.”
Such deals are typically more beneficial to the content creators, as well. TikTok is still new despite its overwhelming success. The platform lacks business friendly features like swiping up for links, description boxes, product tagging, etc. This drawback gives it a decided disadvantage in comparison to sites like YouTube and Instagram that have in-built features that make buying products or even visiting websites easier.
But it is not only brands that reach out to creators with deals. HoneyHouse, a collaborative content creation team made up of 6 individuals reported reaching out to possible sponsors with bundles of their own. Their pitches contain media kits with sponsorship menus that list down all the possible ways they can collaborate with a brand to promote them. The options range from anywhere between $5000 – $250,000.
Apart from product promotions, influencers are also asked to promote music on the app by using either hashtags or dance challenges.
At the moment, TikTok is riding on a wave of success. Although the platform still continues to face opposition from various legislations and is caught up in messy deals, it has proven its overwhelming influence. Even so, competitors like Instagram Reels are gearing up to redirect some of the sponsorship revenue towards themselves. While TikTok is making attempts to help creators use the platform’s existing tools in a more business savvy manner, to survive 2021, it will have to add new features to make the app more monetizable.
