TIKTOK, a short video-sharing social media networking site, is not just the most downloaded social media app in 2020, it is also now the rising platform for news and information.
Committed to being present in every platform where the audiences are, SunStar Davao drums up its footprints on Tiktok in May this year and has since grown its following exponentially to over 360,000 followers and 4.1 million cumulative likes as of September 23, 2021.
As of today, SunStar Davao is one of the largest news creators on TikTok in the Philippines with 35 million views from all the content it uploaded for the past 60 days.
“This has always been our commitment, to bring quality journalism to the Dabawenyos. And we do not limit ourselves to telling stories and producing stories through print. We now maximize and expand our platforms to reach the community we pledged to serve,” Sun Star Davao editor-in-chief Reuel John Lumawag said.
Apart from continuing to serve its current audience, SunStar Davao’s direction moving forward is to also increasingly tap younger audiences to keep the future leaders and players of the country well-informed and guided, hence, the efforts on social media including Tiktok which users are mostly millennials and Gen Zs.
But what did SunStar Davao do to achieve such a feat in a short span of time in a relatively new platform like Tiktok?
It started by reuploading slices of Newsbits Tonight, a daily online newscast broadcasted live on Facebook and Youtube. One news item is equivalent to one Tiktok post. But the social media team felt the need to try new approaches that are more relatable and apt to the video-sharing app’s audience.
This gave birth to the daily news round-up titled “#AllYouNeedToKnow for today” delivered by SunStar Davao’s young journalists.
Another effective approach SunStar Davao did on Tiktok is creating content that is not purely hard news -- it shall also touch stories on pop culture, trending topics, feature stories of inspiring people, and updates of personalities - celebrities, social media influencers, athletes and politicians.
SunStar Davao understands that in order to stand out in a platform with millions of new content daily, you need to have a personality, consistency, and inject entertainment value.
“It should be more than just getting news from our website then uploading it on TikTok. Here, we need to be more creative. It’s more on producing fact-based news and content injected with an element of fun for it to be engaging to the younger audience,” SunStar Davao social media team shared.
But the team maintained that every content posted on TikTok, no matter how playful, goes through an editorial process to maintain the organization’s journalistic values.
Delivering news and information in an age of social media poses a challenge to how journalists remain relevant in a fast-changing media landscape.
“Our social media team keeps on thinking of ways on how to responsibly deliver stories to the communities while making it compelling, and relatable to different audiences. Our commitment remains to be chronicling the stories of the people, community regardless of the channel, platform,” Lumawag added.
Moving forward, Sun Star Davao continues to launch new segments and innovations on a platform that is fun but powerful like TikTok.