Key Points:

• Let's start with YouTube, it’s the second biggest search engine and one of the key places we go to learn just about anything.
• YouTube suits brands that educate, and is a great place to remove barriers to purchase through demonstration and helping people to see how great you are.
• It also suits anyone who wants to spruik their own brand, with the job title of YouTuber becoming coveted amongst teens.
• We build connections through video much faster than any other digital medium, so it makes sense we connect with our brands that way.
• It is also busy and messy, so you need to drive traffic there for cut through, and of course ultimately direct folk back to your website for clean, uncluttered transactions. YouTube has a reputation for being haphazard when it comes to monetisation and shadowing your channel too, so beware of having all your eggs in one basket.
• TikTok is another medium driven by video. Still the newish kid on the block compared to the Meta family, it is wild and free, building legions of new influencers, but harder to monetise as those functions haven’t been built in yet.
• If you want to get a following hanging off your every move, create content and lots of it, TikTok is a fun place to be.
• But it's not a place for direct selling - yet. It's a place for direct communication that builds your emotion and where you can amass a legion of followers to covert to other sales channels.
• If your customers are young, cool, engaged and up for anything, TikTok could be the place for your brand.
• Snapchat – is another one for the younger end of the millennial and beyond market. It's ephemeral and still used largely as messaging between people.
• Some big brands have managed to use Snapchat for short sharp campaigns, but it is not one of the best platforms for most businesses to use for amplification.

UPDATE: The Australian and Tasmanian Governments have banned the use of TikTok on government devices for security reasons. While there is no ban currently for businesses or citizens in Tasmania or nationally, it is suggested that TikTok users consider the way they manage their security and content when using the platform. The following advice was provided to the Tasmanian Government public service staff from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) when using TikTok as below and can be used as a guide for some basic security protocols for your business:

• do not use it on a phone that can access any official information (email clients, MS Teams, passwords, personal identifying data),
• if a phone does have TikTok installed, keep the phone away from any sensitive conversations,
• remove metadata (such as location information) from photos and videos before uploading them to TikTok.