retight in a plain white T-shirt and a wrap skirt, Melanie Greenwood puts her phone on the windowsill in the hallway of her house in Holland Park West, Brisbane, and presses record. Joined by her 14-year-old niece, Macey, she begins to leap to techno rhythms, giggling through a short choreographed dance routine. The performance is far from perfect, and at one point, Mélanie’s husband enters, disconcerted.
Then the 36-year-old two-year-old mom posts the video to TikTok without thinking too much about it – she recently joined the app at the insistence of her niece obsessed with social media.
Fast forward 24 hours and the clip has been watched by over two million users worldwide. Two days later, it goes to five million views.
It was in December 2019, and today the video represents more than nine million views. “It increases every few days,” says Melanie, a former beauty salon owner who trusts the handle @ melgreenwoodbeauty83. “I still don’t know why it went viral.”
For the uninitiated, TikTok is the latest social media app to take over. Created in 2017 by the Chinese company ByteDance, it is the fastest growing video sharing platform in the world. Last year, it was the second most downloaded application in the world. Today it has nearly 2 billion users in 154 countries.
First of all, the best-dressed teenagers and tweens were naturally the best-dressed. After all, TikTok offers micro-doses of entertainment – users create and share videos that only last 15 seconds – perfect for the attention-deficient. It is also widely traded on participation. TikTok users challenge each other with dance routines or lip sync on sound clips. It could be a choreography connected to a retro piece by Mariah Carey (which becomes particularly meta when Mariah joins the challenge); play a sequence of emojis with his hands; or a high kick on a bottle of drink. Each challenge comes out of nowhere, then goes through the application like wildfire before disappearing.
One of these challenges was Melanie’s viral video: a dance routine of eight simple movements to the Russian dance song “Rakurs & Ramirez Remix”. 646,000 users also participated, but it was his video that created the landing page for For You (no one on the Internet can understand the algorithm behind this page and, make no mistake, they tried ). She is now a full-fledged TikTok star, posting three times a day between two girls, Chloé, eight, who suffers from the rare genetic disorder Koolen-de Vries Syndrome, and Charlotte, three. “It definitely breaks the monotony of being at home all day with the kids,” she says. It also gives her a boost when, say, a recent 15-second clip of her standing in front of a mirror, spinning her phone, aka #rotationchallenge, drew 270,000 breathtaking views.
Two things are surprising here: first, how mundane most viral videos on the platform are; and two, that Mélanie is not a rare fish in adolescence waters of TikTok. She is one of a growing group of mothers who seem totally taken aback as they produce countless videos of herself dancing and lip syncing, playfully serving up songs and memes from comedy.
For mom of two Keiara Moore (@aussiemumvlogger), much of the appeal of the app is its ease of use. A single video to her 44,000 YouTube subscribers – where she has been vlogging since the birth of her daughter Mila with a cleft palate in 2017 – takes a few days to create, while a more ambitious TikTok video takes only a few minutes. “And the engagement is much higher,” said Keiara, also an 18-month-old mother of Lincoln. It attracts approximately 8,000 views per vlog, but a video of her dance in the living room of her house in Kingscliff, NSW, at “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor has recently been viewed more than 120,000 times.
To date, videos with the hashtag #mumlife and #momlife have garnered 3.3 billion views. And #tiktokmum and #tiktokmom are at 177.4 million. This means that the largest user base of the application, those under 24, is actively searching for their content.
“It reminds me of dancing in my living room with my sister when I was a child. Very carefree, ”says Keiara, 26. “And what I noticed was that everyone seemed to be celebrating. I saw very little negativity and trolling.”
Divorced and divorced mom Donna Clarke (@tiktokaussiemum) has striking red hair and six feet tall. She says her “fans” are mostly teenagers, who celebrate the 45-year-old part-time model while trying routines like “Starving” by Hailee Steinfeld, or when she walks in a pink polka dot bikini to Dej Loaf “Back Up” in the bedroom of his Gold Coast house. “I get a lot of comments from kids saying that my figure is amazing,” says Donna. “They can’t believe I had a child.” Its videos, published almost every day, can attract nearly half a million views. But what does her 17-year-old son Kai think? “He’s only interested in his friends these days,” she says, shrugging.
IIn September of last year, Reese Witherspoon made her debut at TikTok. In a behind-the-scenes video shared on Instagram, she asks her 16-year-old son Deacon to teach her “what TikTok is”. Then she learns to “hit the woah” – a teenage phenomenon that involves making a quick circular motion with her fists, and freezing when the pace drops (think about stamping 2.0).
His attempt is awkward and awkward, but charming, and Deacon’s reaction seems to be a mixture of embarrassment and endearing – which could reflect the views of his Generation Z classmates who watch these videos over and over.
According to social media expert Laurel Papworth, humor is what attracts these moms to TikTok in the first place. “It’s awkward and a little comic relief,” says Papworth. “Instagram is synonymous with perfection – which can be exhausting for moms – always showing their best selves. But TikTok is all about taking off your shoes and dropping your hair. There is no pressure to create filtered, tuned and flawless content.
This is what drew Dannii Reed (@mummyrepublic) to TikTok late last year. The Brisbane-based mom of two Instagram account is set up and ready, hooked up to a successful podcast on the challenges moms face every day. But TikTok? “I feel like I can show the funniest side of me,” says Dannii, 32. And it works. A recent seven-second skit about her reaction to some unsolicited pregnancy counseling drew 434,000 views.
That said, Dannii is unlikely to turn his TikTok prowess into a professional business anytime soon. Unlike YouTube, TikTok doesn’t share advertising revenue, so the only real way to make money is through branding deals, much like Instagram. And although #tiktokmums can get the views – and even the likes – the users aren’t actually following them. Melanie scores nearly 500,000 likes for her videos, but her followers are at a meager 53,000. To put this in perspective, the biggest TikTok star in the world, teenager Charli D’Amelio, has more than 48 million of followers.
Moms are usually a sign of an outward trend rather than an upward trend, but TikTok may be the exception to the rule. Right now, with most of us locked up at home in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the popularity of the platform in general is on the rise, and the famous mothers of Jessica Alba at Courteney Cox have
has now jumped on board, performing hilarious dance routines with their daughters and reinforcing the role of “embarrassing mom”.
It is not surprising that the application peaks in this time of crisis. In fact, there might be something to learn from the original moms of TikTok. Whether caring for sick children or juggling work and family, most have turned to the app for release and relief. And now the rest of us are finally making our way: when the outside world seems uncertain and overwhelming, there is sometimes nothing better to do than stay at home and dance.
