How To Start a TikTok Trend
By: Mckenzie Gerdes
Illustrated by: Carla Cieza Espinoza
TikTok is easily one of the fastest-growing social media apps in the world, with over a billion users. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this platform is the fact that anyone can go viral at any moment. The question is, how does it happen?
TikTok is unique because it started under a different name: Musical.ly. Musical.ly was created in China in 2014 by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. While it was successful at the time with its simple lip-sync format, it could never have been what it is today without the changes it underwent.
In 2017, Bytedance merged their creation, TikTok, with Musical.ly, providing a platform with more freedom for users to post short videos of whatever they wanted. Vine, a similar app that specialized in user-produced short content, shut down in 2016. TikTok seems to have filled that vacuum in the social media world.
But what makes TikToks go viral? I asked a small TikToker, Faith Zimmerman, whose content focuses mainly on talking about emotions and creating movie edits. Zimmerman said that, in her experience, comedy sounds go viral and create a cycle of tons of people making a similar video with that same sound.
Entertainment is TikTok’s top category, and comedy is very prominent on the app. One comedy trend that has gone viral and remains viral, is the “Berries and Cream” side of TikTok. This TikTok sound originally comes from a 2007 Starburst commercial. It was brought into 2021 when people started using the sound to make TikToks showing off literal berries and cream dishes. Other TikTokers began dancing like the character, “Little Lad,” from the original commercial.
This trend has grown to be a sensation and doesn’t show signs of stopping, as people are now making intricate remixes of the song. To bring even more attention to the trend, the actor that originally performed as “Little Lad” has now made a TikTok for the character and is getting millions of views.
Perhaps a measure of the app's success and the nature of viral content, many people using Tiktok will adapt viral sounds to their own vocabulary. The "Berries and Cream" song does not exist solely on Tiktok, but is promoted in person between friends in classrooms and workspaces.
Comedy sounds are a key factor in TikTok virality. However, the intricacies of achieving popularity are hard to navigate. My hypothesis is that TikTokers who can make comedic and relatable content are going viral frequently because comedy is consistently entertaining for most app users. In reality, it seems TikTok is a place of pure chaos, where videos and sounds go viral overnight.
This app does not show signs of slowing down, and if anything, will continue to grow because it is a platform for anyone to create potentially trend-worthy content.
Illustrated by Carla Cieza Espinoza.