TikTok is no stranger to being in the news. From a new House bill to ban it in the U.S. to Jennifer Coolidge’s somewhat silly debut on the platform, people can’t help but chit-chat about TikTok.

But according to reporting by Digiday.com, 39 of the top 50 Comscore news publishers are now on TikTok. In a survey reported by CNN published by Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford, about half of the world’s top newsrooms post to the platform.

Here are links to a few major news publishers on TikTok:

• Washington Post
• Washington Times
• Sky News
• CNN
• The Wall Street Journal

If you have a second to pursue through some of the videos, you may be surprised how well TikTok can be at telling (or perhaps the right word is showing) news content.

Check out this video from CNN’s TikTok. Is there even a better way to show off this new technology from Boston Dynamics?

And consider these helpful tips from the Wall Street Journal account. Isn’t this so much more engaging, personal, and intimate than reading?

– ADVERTISEMENT KEEP READING BELOW –

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What we can learn

TikTok is so not just for entertainment and dancing cats. To those who don’t use the platform, you may not have realized how TikTok has matured. Companies that want to engage with individuals 30 and below (whether now or when they get older), need to have a short form video strategy. Not just creating short form video, but rethinking your entire content strategy to focus on video, because that’s where people are spending time.

You can take what content already works and repackage on TikTok. Obviously, news publishers are content powerhouses, they have big budgets, and they have plenty of videos. So, yeah, it’s easier for a big publisher like the Washington Post to create a TikTok with a huge following. However, if you swipe through their accounts, you’ll notice that though the medium has changed to short form video, much of the content is a repackaging of what’s already working for them. If you look through your best performing content, it’s likely you can find a way to create it in video form, and get it to work well on TikTok.

TikTok could become the most popular source for news. No one can see the future, but consider this 2020 research from Pew. The stats that are of interest are as follows:

• 60% of people regularly get news from smartphone devices
• 52% prefer to get news from digital platforms
• 11% of all people prefer to get news from social media
• Individuals 18-29 get their news most often from social media 

While people of all ages like to get their news from a variety of sources and a big divide for preferences by age, social media is the most popular source for news among young adults. With TikTok being the fastest growing app, it is not impossible to foresee that in 10 years, most people get their news from TikTok. Time will tell, but a trend for news publishers to keep an eye on.