Rami Zeidan, Head of Video and Creative at TikTok, explains why and how the platform is pushing educational content.
Building on the surge of educational content, #LearnOnTikTok is set to give users the opportunity to learn new skills and share knowledge around a variety of topics. As a result, throughout the past few months, TikTok has seen a 300% growth of educational content.
Could you explain in detail how the #LearnOnTikTok initiative works?
Building on the increasing popularity of education on the platform, the #LearnOnTikTok initiative has been created to give users the opportunity to learn new skills and share knowledge around a variety of topics. This is the latest challenge that is set to change the way the TikTok community consumes educational content online.
Over the upcoming months, TikTok and its most popular creators will be educating users through a stream of topic-focused challenges and live sessions around key topics such as technology, science, art, language, and history. Users can simply search for #LearnOnTikTok to get access to all the latest educational content, wherever they are.
The focus areas for the educational content stream has been carefully curated based on the interests of our community. For example, through the #ScienceFacts hashtag, our creators will share their insights and knowledge, as well as chemistry experiments, live on TikTok for our community to enjoy. Additionally, through #تعلم_الفنون or #ArtLearning hashtag, we are encouraging our art fanatics to show off their favorite art masterpieces, and this will be complemented by live sessions from our art connoisseurs.
To date, #LearnOnTikTok has garnered a whopping of 49.6 billion views. We encourage our community to get on TikTok and create educational content around things they’re passionate or knowledgeable about through #LearnOnTikTok.
How are you selecting the topics for these challenges?
We started seeing a change in user interests during this year due to the pandemic. Since people’s preferences have adjusted, we saw new topics arise on the platform such as technology, language, and history, to name a few. Hence, through this shift, it helped us select topics that are not only being consumed but created on a daily basis by creators across the region.
What was the reason behind the launch of this initiative?
We launched the #LearnOnTikTok initiative because we started noticing a shift in the way creators and consumers are creating content on the platform. Over the past few months, TikTok has seen huge interest in educational content - in fact, there has been an increase of over 300% on educational content alone. Therefore, we wanted to provide our community with a platform where they can not only teach but also learn from other creators in a seamless, fun, and engaging way.
Is this surge in popularity in educational content on the platform fairly recent or has it been happening for a while?
We started seeing a rise in educational content on the platform during the start of the pandemic. However, over recent months, we’ve seen a huge uptake on educational content. We wanted to further build on this and create a space for our community to learn and discover new passions along the way.
