User Formations on TikTok: Challenging Traditional Notions of Online Collectives on Social Media

Abstract

TikTok is a social media platform that has had a significant impact on technological trends and user behavior since its international launch in 2017. Users form in online collectives on the platform based on shared interests or commonalities. TikTok users unofficially label these online collectives to distinguish them from one another. Marketing and consumer culture literature has found interest in these online collectives on TikTok and often conceptualize them as communities, however, limited scrutiny is put on the examination of how these online collectives relate to the theoretical conceptualization of community, which has implications for researchers and marketers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to understand how the nature of user formations within Toks, in terms of social dynamics, communication patterns, and user and consumption practices, contribute to shaping Toks as distinct forms of online collectives, challenging traditional notions of communities and publics in social media contexts. This is explored through the case of BookTok, which is a user formation of book and reading enthusiasts on TikTok. The study finds that social dynamics, group affiliation, clusters, and communication types and patterns are interconnected elements that play a role in determining the type of user formation that takes place on BookTok. The identified themes are influenced by the technological setting that is the TikTok platform and are also mediated by users’ underlying motives, who constantly produce and reproduce the space through repeated ways of behaving and communicating. This study finds BookTok to be a space that in some ways both resemble a community and a networked public due to the complex social dynamics where users form in clusters. This study challenges the assumption inherent in the current literature that user formations on TikTok are communities and suggests an emergence of a distinct form of online collective that is enabled by the technological affordances of TikTok.