Following the launch of a global TikTok strategy in February, the Mail says its account has outpaced its news competitors and has increased its reach by 1500% in just six months.
The publisher says an expanded TikTok team is deploying Mail journalists from across the globe - both print and digital – to help create a wide range of content and to produce an industry-leading portfolio based on the Mail’s core topics, including royals, crime, sport and showbiz.
This success has helped extend the reach of the Daily Mail brand to millions of young people across the world and is part of a broader global video strategy to target new audiences, added the publisher.
In addition to the growth in followers, the Daily Mail claims its account also boasts more ‘likes’ than its competitors, demonstrating how this growing young audience is highly engaged.
Among the recently-launched new Daily Mail TikTok accounts are DM Royals – fronted by the Daily Mail’s iconic cast of royal commentators - and CrimeTok, delving into some of the world’s most notorious crimes and produced by Mail journalists in London, New York and LA.
MailOnline’s head of social video Phil Harvey credits the team’s success to support offered by colleagues around the business: “What we have achieved is down to the collective brainpower of a global newsroom of journalists, enabling our team of creative social video producers to tell trending stories directly to their peers. Together, we have successfully tapped into a sweet spot between news and culture.”
Danny Groom, MailOnline publisher and editor, said: “This is a fantastic achievement and a huge credit to Phil and our teams around the world. They have worked tirelessly to harvest the best of our journalistic talent to produce consistently engaging content and build a new audience for the Daily Mail brand.”
Ted Verity, editor, Mail Newspapers, said: “The moment which for me summed up what we’re trying to achieve across platforms came when Boris Johnson’s 30-second video promoting his brilliant Saturday newspaper column on dangerous dogs got nearly 4 million TikTok views with 373,000 likes and almost 15,000 comments.”
TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform for news. Twenty percent of 18-24-year-olds use the platform to learn about current events, up 5 percentage points from last year, according to a report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
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