Hey! 🤠 Welcome to the first edition of Vibe Check — a n*wsl*t*er unpacking viral moments for brands. 🤝
This week, Cappuccino (a podcast app for your friends) went viral on Tik Tok. The result? They hit #8 on the App Store social chart over the weekend.
The beauty (and torture) of Tik Tok is that all it takes is one video. One video can completely blow any previous user acquisition efforts out of the water. One video can force you to re-write your brand copy and fuel your social content for the next 6 months. One video can catapult you to the top of the App Store charts. One video can help you pass the coveted Gen Z vibe check.
The best app to have happened to the girls
For Cappuccino, that one video was completely and entirely organic. Brittany, a 22 year old Communications student in Ohio, enjoys making random Tik Tok videos about life and products she’s enjoying. Last week, she decided to quickly hack together a video about an app she had been using to keep in touch with her girlfriends during COVID.
Before posting, Brittany had 2,000 followers on Tik Tok. Most of her videos tended to get anything from 100 to 1,000 views. So, not your textbook influencer. She posted Wednesday night, with a somewhat slow start, before the video started to blow up on Thursday. Today, the video is at nearly 3M views, with the conversation about the app spilling over to Twitter and the Cappuccino app continuing to rank high on the App Store. Brittany had unintentionally stumbled across the perfect hook to capture the attention of Gen Z, especially girls.
Brittany’s video is the perfect example of ‘recommendation Tik Tok’ — where users recommend everything from apps, to the best Amazon products to buy, to cooking hacks, to inventive new ways to curl your hair — in a raw, real, and crucially, non-commercial way. Gen Z can sniff out an ad from a mile away. Just take a look through the comments section of any organic content from a brand that performs well — either the kids congratulate the brand for creating good content, “this was a good ad”, or congratulate the social media manager in charge1.
Welcome to Tik Tok School
Unfortunately, not every brand will have a Brittany equivalent ready to create content that goes viral on Tik Tok. But there is still much to learn from this example:
Tik Tok is still the wild west for brand marketing — all it takes is one organic video to go viral to supercharge an early-stage company’s App Store ranking and create a flood of new users. Is there anything you can build into your product or brand storytelling that encourages this kind of content creation?
The best brand content on Tik Tok is authentic, raw, unpolished. In this case, this video was authentic in that it came from (1) a legit Cappuccino user, and (2) wasn’t sponsored or pre-meditated.
User-generated content, especially the stuff that goes viral, is the perfect source for UA inspiration. Before spending all your VC money testing ads to figure out what messaging is going to resonate with people, go out into the internet and actually see what people are saying about you and how they’re describing your product to their friends. If your product is not live, go see how people are describing the problem you’re solving, in their own words.
What Cappuccino should do next:
Hire Brittany. 🤗
Harness the insights from this viral moment — read every single comment under the Tik Tok video, search Twitter, read every app store review coming in. These insights should feed back into everything from UA copy, to brand tone of voice. This is direct insight into what convinces people to download the app.
Turn the hype into a community — use a brand account to reply to comments/tweets/messages across social platforms, re-post the video to all existing social channels to show that you passed the Gen Z vibe check and give people a platform who are posting positively about the app. DM those who said they downloaded the app to conduct user research and deepen the relationship with them (they might just be the creator of the next viral video for your app).
🤝💫
Thanks for reading the first edition of Vibe Check! Maybe you learned something, maybe you’re wondering when on earth you subscribed to this newsletter (🙃), but if you did happen to enjoy the read, please consider sharing on Twitter or forwarding to a friend! 📲
From Paris with love,
Exceptions to the rule of course being the holy grail of branded TT accounts like The Washington Post, Ryanair, Planet Money, amongst others — accounts that have thoroughly passed the vibe check.