Welcome to Business Briefs! The world of academic publications features fascinating findings from real-world experiments in business and the marketplace. Here are some key takeaways and applicable nuggets of knowledge that may be helpful for your business.
Business TikTok Presence
Amidst data-mining concerns, bans on governmental workplace access to TikTok haven’t really done much to curb its influence. It continues to chart a 150%-ish increase in year-over-year users.
So naturally, it’s just good business to figure out paths to promotion that leverage TikTok presence. Every form of social media has its own special angle and appeal; here’s what researchers have learned about TikTok audience preferences.
To assess viewer interests, a research team surveyed 217 followers of a TikTok influencer with a following that exceeded 125,000. According to survey findings, the feature most admired by the followers was “originality” or creativity. For what it’s worth, this characteristic is also highly valued on Instagram as well.
The quality of posts was also somewhat important to followers, but markedly less so than originality. And quantity of posts was actually not important at all. Regularity in messaging does not necessarily support audience growth.
Humor (often related to originality), according to the researchers, is way more important on TikTok than in other mediums.
The big takeaway for the project was that followers weren’t particularly interested in opinion leaders (celebrities) on TikTok. Rather, it seems to be the case that anyone who comes up with original, funny content can amass a following, and thereby become an opinion leader.
Influencer marketing on TikTok: The Effectivenesss of Humor and Followers’ Hedonic Experience – Sergio Barta, Daniel Belanche, Ana Fernández & Marta Flavián, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services
Fighting Distraction at Work
Working online is one big constant distraction. Good night, especially during long meetings. We’re always just one click away from something vastly more interesting that the duty at hand.
But what if you could deliberately eliminate temptation…would you do it? The findings of a recent study on productivity suggest some interesting things about workers who worry about their own distractibility.
In a study of 409 workers, researchers gave each worker a choice to remove online distraction temptation to improve productivity. In general, only 19% of the workers overestimated their need to remove distraction, while 48% underestimated their need to remove distractions. The rest of us were somewhere in between.
What does that mean? It means that about half of us lose productivity because we mistakenly think we can ignore distractions. The 19% that overestimated their need to eliminate distractions were characterized as “pessimistic,” but even with distractions, they ended up more productive than peers and having less productivity loss than they expected.
That is, the colleague who is the most worried about being distracted IS the colleague who is the most productive. And the most confident colleague? Well, not so much.
Pessimism and Overcommitment: An Online Experiment with Tempting YouTube Content – Claes Ek and Margart Samahita, Research Repository UCD
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Employee job satisfaction is the special sauce, right? It’s the magic that inspires employees to stay with a company.
But is there anything else? Does anything else matter?
Well, kinda.
A study profiled 994 full-time workers, assessing in particular those who intended to quit or were unsure whether they’d stay with an organization. Categorized as “quitters,” employees falling into these categories tended to skew a little younger, and are less likely to be parents. They also profiled as more open and more neurotic.
Among high-performing workers, well-being measures did not seem to predict whether they intended to quit. But what the study did suggest was that, in addition to job dissatisfaction, a sense of disengagement was also a significant predictor of intentions to quit. So, engagement is key to retention.
Worker Well-Being and Quit Intentions – Diane Pelley, Research Repository UCD
