Nearly 7 million likes, close to 100,000 followers, weeks with 4 million views, and some videos with over a million views: This describes Dagbladet’s adventure on TikTok.

Dagbladet launched its TikTok account in March 2022 to start communicating with a younger audience. We wanted to meet youngsters where they are and inform them about the news of the world, although we were uncertain if this group of people would be interested in the news.

In a short time, this account has grown and engaged widely with content that focuses on news. The variation of videos on Dagbladet’s TikTok is wide and includes entertaining celebrity videos, funny viral videos, and hard news. We find the raw material for these videos via news agencies, social media, and popular Web sites. And the content reflects the news coverage on our main platform, db.no.

Becoming specialists

Everyone in our editorial office at Dagbladet TV has become a TikTok specialist in a short amount of time. We make video content on our original Dagbladet site, and if we think this story could, or sometimes should, engage with a younger audience, we transform the video into a vertical format and post it on TikTok.

The content is well adapted to fit into the platform, being relatively short and to the point. We have discovered that the process of converting and adapting a video from a newspaper to TikTok is a much shorter transfer than one might think, and the adaption is going seamlessly.

Even though we adapt the content to better fit into the TikTok universe, we also work on keeping the Dagbladet brand feeling by keeping our colours, our short and big headlines, and our ability to bring people news in a lighter, more tabloid way. By staying true to the brand, we are ensuring our followers know who the content is coming from.

In doing this, we have opened the possibility to reach out with journalism to a whole new target group, and our incredible growth shows that our audience appreciates the content being served. This is a target group that usually is hard to reach.

Reaching a new audience

TikTok has a much younger audience than we have on our original site, Dagbladet, and we use other social media as well. This includes Snapchat and Facebook, but by being on TikTok, we also get a much closer interaction between the viewer and sender. The opportunity to “talk” with our viewers quickly is unique for this platform.

The important thing about TikTok is presence — not just the phenomenon of being present on the app itself, but the fact that this is the perfect platform for breaking news. The sort of intense way of being awake inside the app, regardless of time or place.

One can talk forever about the ups and downs of that, but the fact is that this gives a unique opportunity to convey, communicate, and reach people with both hard and breaking news as well as more curious stories.

Never have we experienced growth like this in such a short period of time on any platform. With our focus on TikTok, we are experiencing a reception without parallel, and we are now engaging with a huge amount of younger people.

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