Making TikTok a Top Destination for Gamers

By BEN INFLUENCER TEAM 01/19/2022

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How did a new social media platform reach 55M potential users?

Case Study at a Glance

COMPANY DESCRIPTION

TikTok is a social media platform driven by short-form video content

FOUNDED

2016

WHY BEN

Unparalleled expertise and relationships in the gaming industry

GLOBAL OFFICES

Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo

the blueprint

Influencer marketing campaigns launched around two major gaming conventions to drive awareness about TikTok

Attract creators from Instagram and YouTube to TikTok to encourage audience awareness of the platform

THE PLATFORMS

Youtube, Instagram

company

Building an Audience for a New Platform

It may be hard now to envision TikTok as anything other than the massive social media (and influencer marketing) platform that it is today. But when it initially launched, many saw it simply as a space to lip-sync or do dance videos. So how did TikTok become a haven for video game influencers and their massive followings? Thanks, in part, to a dedicated partnership with BEN to strategically attract gaming creators to the platform.

TikTok knew that if creators migrated to the app, their followers likely would as well. That’s why TikTok enlisted BEN to draw well-known gamers with established followings on YouTube, Instagram, or Twitch to start creating content on TikTok as well.

Building a presence from scratch on a brand new platform was a tall order, and BEN needed to address two key questions: how to interest new users in TikTok, and how to find the right kind of content for creators to showcase on the platform. Seizing a moment when engagement among gamers would be at its peak, BEN timed TikTok’s campaigns to coincide with two of the biggest events in gaming: E3 and San Diego Comic-Con in summer 2019.

The nature of the campaign enabled influencers to get creative with content, too. On other platforms, most gamers typically stream footage of themselves playing games, but TikTok’s short-form style required creators to go beyond their comfort zone. BEN worked with creators to pivot to content ideas that featured humorous skits related to games, behind the scenes footage of the event, and more.

The Creators

Using Industry Events to Advantage

Selecting creators for the E3 campaign initially required BEN’s deep existing relationships with the big-name creators TikTok wanted, like key influencer Lazarbeam. The E3 campaign ultimately reached more than 55 million users across Instagram and YouTube, and two of the campaign’s YouTube videos made the top-three trending page in the gaming vertical. Lazarbeam’s YouTube video trended #1 overall, with high click-through rates on both his Instagram and YouTube pages.

As the campaign progressed, BEN identified several key traits that made creators likely to be good candidates for promoting TikTok, including how frequently the creators posted, what other platforms they were already on, and if their audience was dedicated to them as an individual, not just to their content. BEN applied these key learnings at Comic-Con a few months later, leveraging its custom artificial intelligence tools to source additional creators that aligned with the success traits BEN identified via the E3 campaign.

BEN’s AI sourced 60% of the Comic-Con campaign creators—and every AI-recommended creator saw click-through rates above YouTube’s benchmark. Two-thirds of the campaign’s YouTube videos trended, and the creators drove more than 10 million likes on TikTok itself.

Thanks to BEN’s work driving gaming creators to TikTok, the platform has permeated gaming culture and has become a must-have app for followers to keep up with their favorite gamers.

55M

USERS REACHED

#1

TRENDING YOUTUBE
VIDEO – LAZARBEAM

10M+

LIKES ON TIKTOK

Ready to Get Started?

Talk to BEN’s Influencer Marketing and Product Placement teams about how we can help you achieve your brand goals.
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