[Hyung-ju Heo's Column] TikTok Creator Aspiring Report for the New Year

Creator Content Guidelines

TikTok's 2024 Trend Report

Taking on the Creator Challenge in 2024

When someone says, ‘I want to be a successful creator!’, the first thing I, as a successful TikTok creator, recommend is to ‘understand the overall trend flow.’

The reason is that understanding the overall trend flow and riding that wave can accelerate growth, and rapid growth becomes a crucial motivator for consistently producing content as a creator.

TikTok has released the <What’s Next 2024 Trend Report>. Today, let's look at the trend report with me and see what strategies we can adopt to become a hit creator in 2024.

Before we begin, TikTok has categorized trends into three types. First, ‘Moments’ refer to short-lived trends, such as popular TikTok sounds and hashtags that everyone uses, lasting from a few days to a few weeks. ‘Signals’ represent new content patterns that reveal emerging behaviors and interests, such as changes in behavior within a specific category or industry, lasting for several months to a few years.

Finally, ‘Forces’ represent large-scale behavioral change trends that can last for several years, indicating significant cultural shifts in how communities are formed, how products are discovered, and so on. The part we'll focus on today is the five trend forces.

Trend Force 1 is the trend of family content, such as ‘couples’ and ‘parenting.’ One of the areas that exploded in 2023 compared to the previous year was ‘family’ stories. For instance, #couplelife (부부생활) saw an 8,116% increase in views year-on-year. In the parenting realm, hashtags like #workingmom (워킹맘), #parentingmom (육아맘), and #dadparenting (아빠육아) also saw significant growth.

The impact of everyday content related to marriage life or parenting has been tremendous. The report anticipates that even more family stories will emerge in 2024, predicting that users of various age groups will engage in fun and unpretentious interactions.

My advice regarding the family trend is that if you dream of becoming a 2024 creator, I encourage you to take on the challenge with your ‘family’ rather than alone. When I first started TikTok, the trend was the heyday of ‘twin creators.’

So, instead of tackling TikTok alone, I joined forces with my younger sister, dressed identically, and followed the trend of filming like twins, which led to explosive growth. In 2024, let's challenge ourselves to become creators who either collaborate with family or share family stories.

Trend Force 2 highlights the growth of communities across various age groups. Not only age-specific hashtags like #20s (20대) and #30s (30대) but also hashtags representing one's identity or status, such as #universitystudent (대학생), #worker (직장인), and #bridetobe (예신), have seen a noticeable increase compared to the previous year.

#aloneliving (자취생), #internationalstudent (유학생), #officeworker (직딩), and various other keywords experienced a rise. This suggests that the trend of forming communities through interactions with individuals who share the same group or circumstances is expected to increase further in 2024.

My advice for this trend is to first pinpoint the community you want to target and then observe how that community communicates. Different communities have different concerns and communication styles.

If you want to create content for a community, I recommend closely monitoring their interactions, analyzing the ‘terms’ they frequently use and the style of content they create, and mirroring those aspects. Also, communities tend to gather around ‘shared experiences,’ so creating content that resonates with their shared experiences will likely garner numerous ‘likes’ and followers.

Trend Force 3 is the growth of the self-development field.#selfdevelopment, #motivation, as well as #entrepreneurship, #realestate, #employment are experiencing an increase in information-related content. Furthermore,#Englishstudy, #booktok, #reading —hashtags related to putting motivation into action—have also shown notable growth across diverse self-development areas.

A field I particularly recommend is #booktok. TikTok is becoming an increasingly popular avenue for marketing new books, and by cultivating a booktok channel, you could develop it into a channel that attracts book-related advertising. Another self-development/educational content area I recommend is Korean language education content.

Coupled with the self-development trend and the K-wave trend mentioned later, we can anticipate the popularity of Korean language content. If you aspire to become a global self-development creator, consider creating content that teaches Korean.

Trend Force 4 is the increase in location/travel hashtags. TikTok added a new ‘location tagging’ feature within the app at the end of last year (2022). This year, hashtags related to regions and locations have experienced significant growth. Content that tags locations when uploading videos and recommends places to visit, such as eateries, has surged.

My advice for this trend is to always use location tags, regardless of the content you choose to post. This is because you can attract followers through location tags. Location tags are a relatively new feature, so there isn't a lot of content accumulated yet.

This presents an opportunity for creators. When there's a lot of content, it's easy for your content to get buried. But when there isn't much content, your content has a higher chance of getting noticed. Utilize location tags.

Finally, Trend Force 5 is the massive wave set to engulf the globe: the K-wave. Various ‘K-’ related areas have experienced explosive growth on global TikTok. #K- related hashtags have seen significant growth, particularly in the beauty and food and beverage industries. In beauty, #koreanskincare, #koreanmakeup are prominent, while in food and beverage, #mukbang, #koreanspicy and related hashtags are abundant.

If you live in Korea and want to become a global creator, I recommend creating content related to Korea. From Korean cosmetics and food to Korean dramas, countless Korean content pieces can be reviewed and introduced, providing opportunities for growth as a global creator. Add a ‘K-’ to introduce aspects of your daily life.

We've explored five major trend forces and incorporated my advice. Summarizing them, we have #family, #community, #selfdevelopment, #location, and #K-. If I were to create a new channel based on these major trends in 2024, I would create a channel where I introduce Korean language education along with my family, while eating famous Korean dishes at famous locations in Korea.

If you're considering becoming a TikTok creator in 2024, try planning your channel by mixing these major trends.

※ I am the author of this article, and it has been adapted froman article contributed to the Woman Economy Newspaper.