In need of restaurant recommendations on a trip? Want to know the best skincare product for dry skin? Looking for home remedies for a sore throat? Forget about Google because apparently, TikTok is where it’s at. It’s a crazy phenomenon to think about, but in recent conversations, all I hear about is my friends using TikTok as their main search engine. Let’s dig deeper and try to figure out why this is happening.
I discovered this when my cousin looked up “what to do in a day in Milan” in her TikTok search bar instead of Google. Call me old fashioned, but I still use Google for these kinds of tips (wikiHow and TripAdvisor are my best friends). But when I saw the results, I was shocked to see the amount of details and information one can get from a search like that. I started to really think about the impact this app has had on our generation and how it has transcended from being considered simply a “social media platform”.
So, why is this really happening? Simple: people post every detail about their lives on it. It has come to the point that we create content to project every aspect of our day-to-day and our experiences, and without knowing it, we become a source of information for people all over the world. Even more so when it relates to trips or products because as human beings and young adults, we are VERY opinionated. This information has accumulated over time and now, what was once just a “Get-Ready-With-Me” or “Travel with me to (…)” is now our main hub for tips on everything in life. In a way, it’s like how reviews on Amazon or TripAdvisor have evolved into the same platform.
Since people show details and give reviews of everything they encounter, we now have the best and worst opinions of anything we can imagine and honestly, I’m not complaining at all. There is a key component to this new way of giving reviews: visuals. With photos and videos, we can now form clearer opinions on places. People talk in more detail and emotion when it’s a voiceover rather than a paragraph on Google Reviews. The combination of that voiceover and the visuals of a place or thing steers us in a clear path of what we actually want.
So, even though Google continues to be a wonderful tool to have, TikTok is taking over by making research a more personal and direct action. We want real reviews, itinerary ideas, restaurant recomendations, and videos of dogs dancing around because at the end of the day, who says we can’t have a laugh or two when planning our next trip?