Communication Author：Jia Li Feb 15, 2019 02:17 PM (GMT+8)

February 14, 2019, Tiktok announced its KOL plan in Japan which targets around 1,000 selected promising KOL candidates across twenty different areas.

Tiktok Launches KOL Plan In Japan. PHOTO: Credit to Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Tiktok is the international version of DouYin (抖音), one of the most popular media app for creating and sharing short videos, developed by ByteDance (字节跳动).

On February 14, 2019, Tiktok announced its KOL plan in Japan which targets around 1,000 selected promising KOL candidates across twenty different areas such as beauty, fashion, food, fitness, travel, and comic etc. This program aims to support KOLs to produce better contents and driver the number of their followers reaching 10 thousand and beyond.

Tiktok may choose to support KOL candidates in the form of creating short videos or provide technical solutions support for them; or giving KOLs opportunities to gain exposures on the internet, TV, or outdoor advertisements, or to collaborate with sponsors.

The content on Tiktok Japan is constantly diversifying.

The top 5 among the most posted categories are Vlog, painting and pottery, pets, comics and short tv shows, pets, food.

The following categories are growing at a high speed such as fashion, fitness, singing, cooking, work efficiency, DIY, beauty, travel, learning tutorials and musical instruments etc.  

Overall, Tiktok seems to do well at the Japanese localization. Tiktok Japan firstly launched in August 2017 and become the most downloaded free apps in the Japan App Store only in 3 months. Japan market alone contributes to around 30% of the Tiktok’s total downloads, Japan Times says.

While it needs to be noticed that only content on Tiktok has been localized, which means other than language settings the Tiktok app is the same around the world. ZHANG Yiming (张一鸣), founder of ByteDance, one mentioned that successfully products like Windows Operating System, Office, and Facebook all distributed the universal version of their products globally. And he thinks the keys to winning successes in overseas markets are product design, algorithm, and local operation/marketing team.

Tiktok started its global expansion plan in the summertime of 2017. Till now it covers more than 150 countries and territories.