Weekly News Insight: TikTok-ing your fashion
Not only music, TikTok is also in fashion now.
Have you ever seen Chiara Ferragni posting another way-too-chic style but found yourself struggling to find the shop which sells the garment? Or watching SHINee pulling out a super cool dance but unable to figure out the type of the glittering bright sneakers worn by the members?
Well, TikTok seems to have an answer for that.
According to China technology analyst Matthew Brennan, TikTok is now developing a reverse image search feature. He showed this new ability on a tweet featuring a TikTok video of China’s famous comedian Xiao Shenyang.
In that video, Brennan took turns highlighting Xiao’s face and clothing. When he highlighted the face of the comedian, lots of videos featuring the comedian appeared. Whereas when Brennan highlighted Xiao’s pants, the algorithm directly searches for similar pants on sale on the e-commerce platforms.
There are some drawbacks to this new feature though. First, the search feature is not available for all users yet. Only a limited number of users are searchable. Besides, it is not clear whether this feature would be available anywhere abroad, considering the privacy concerns.
Object recognition feature is not new, though TikTok is the first to link it with a similar video search and an e-commerce platform. Facebook has long applied the tech in its photo automatic-tagging feature. But users’ privacy concern drives Facebook to set the feature as an optional feature.
Customer Insight
For the customer, TikTok’s new feature is definitely a great enhancement to their social media and online shopping experience. Linking one video to other videos might not be that great. After all, that’s what hashtag allowed us to do.
Direct access to an e-commerce platform, though, is revolutionary. It eases us on finding either the piece of clothing or the pair of sneakers we like from the very video we watch.
No longer we have to search that long, descriptive keywords on Google. The algorithm simply identifies the traits of the goods that we want and search for objects with similar traits.
Marketer Insight
For the marketer, another feature that could drive up sales is never bad. Different from tagging features in other social media platforms which simply navigates the potential customers to their business profile, this feature would allow the customers to directly access the shopping platforms. This ease of buying things would surely increase consumers’ purchases.
Another take for the marketer is the explicit indicator that they can utilize to evaluate the sales conversion rate of each influencer they hire.
Amidst the rising hype of influencer marketing, influencers’ effect on direct product sales is still hard to grasp, though some smart indicators are now available. This new feature of TikTok could answer this need by tracking the number of sales generated from each video of the influencers.
Final Thought
The new feature of TikTok sure is a ground-breaking feature in building an interconnecting social and e-commerce ecosystem. The privacy concern is something TikTok needs to address immediately before they go big. If TikTok does succeed in tackling this problem, it would alter our experience as social media users totally. And it won’t be long before other social media platforms follow suit.
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