They take security very seriously at the TikTok office in Dublin. I have to go through some three rounds of identity checks, including supplying a photograph and an signature, before I’m finally handed a lanyard and escorted to the space where they are holding their first event. There are some 3,000 employees of TikTok in Dublin, and their new domain is the Sorting Office building at Grand Canal Dock.
They are hosting a Trends Forecast 2024 event, which is slightly like pinning the tail on the donkey while blindfold in the social media world. Part of the point of TikTok’s huge success is that you never know what might show up next in your feed, nor which posts will, as the expression goes, “blow up”. But here we are, peering into the TikTok crystal ball for the rest of the year.
The presentation is shared by Louisa McGillicuddy, who has a title of “Trends Lead”, and Rebecca O’Keeffe, who is “Content Partnership Lead”. From what I can gather, the forecast in what’s going to be topical is partly based on looking at current engagement in various themes or communities, all of which have a particular hashtag.
The topics are: fashion, beauty, and cores; food and drink; travel; sport, health and fitness; TV and film; BookTok; music; and ones to watch.
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I had not heard of #hopecore before, but posts from this hashtag has increased six fold in recent months – or is that weeks? Whichever, get ready for a lot of “uplifting content”, and motivational quotes, screenshots of pieces of writing superimposed over pretty scenery – “Don’t look back, you’re not going that way” is one example – and memes that feature basically nice things. McGillicuddy predicts that this is going to become a big area of interest.
In fashion, there is something called #coquette. I had seen a post that apparently helped start this trend, which was of wine glasses with ribbons tied around their stems. It went viral. I know. It sounds bonkers. But people loved it (I was bemused) and started tying ribbons to all manner of things, and now we have #coquette, with people posting videos with “Lots of lace and pearls and ribbons.”
For food and drink, last year the big trend was olive oil ice cream. (No thanks.) Right now, anything involving Korean food is huge. And remember Girl Dinner? The trend where women assembled some savoury bits and pieces, usually cold, and ate it alone instead of doing any cooking? “#dessertbowl is the new #girldinner,” McGillicuddy says
She plays a video that seems to have started this trend. It’s a woman pouring popcorn into a large bowl, then tossing in some M&M’s and pieces of chocolate. That’s it. I’d call it using one bowl instead of a bowl for the popcorn and a plate for the chocolate, but on TikTok you can reframe anything and call it anything. That there is #dessertbowl and it is going to be big.
TikTok is stuffed with GRWM – Get Ready With Me videos, which feature (usually) women chattering away to the camera while they put on make-up. The new GRWM is going to be #lunch box. What’s that? Videos of people making their lunches at home to take to work. Tinfoil sandwiches are dead. These lunches come stacked in layers, in bento boxes. “People are trying to be thrifty, so this is now a thing.”
In Fitness and Wellness, the big new thing is #callisthenics. It’s had 1.8 million posts, far exceeding ones for #swimming, for example. It’s a form of balletic gymnastics, and people are posting from their gyms doing these movements.
There’s talk about how #sport in general will be big on TikTok in this Olympic year.
As for #BookTok, where Colleen Hoover hoovered up millions of readers, watch out for Sarah J Maas, whose just-published book House of Flame and Shadow is already gaining astonishing traction.
For the travel section, I take away just one piece of quite astounding information. The place in the world which has by many, many multiples of millions of posts is #dubai with 27 millions posts. Whether this says more about the city as having particularly industrious influencers, or that Dubai is a city that receives a ton of tourists who are stuck to their phones night and day with little else to do, I could not tell you.
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