Collaborative Young Driver TikTok Channel

BACKGROUND

The way people consume media and search for information has changed beyond recognition over the past two decades. Media outlets have become more niche and the landscape more fragmented. Young drivers have begun moving away from Facebook and Instagram, towards more short-form platforms, including TikTok.

As well as using their channels to share their content with followers, a growing number of young people use TikTok as an alternative to Google when searching for information and advice. This presents a clear risk for road safety, as influencers and channels can easily propagate inaccurate information, or worse, glamourise risky behaviours. 

In 2021, FirstCar seeded a TikTok channel to test the market and establish a foothold. 24 months later, we’ve grown to over 50,000 followers. As you will see from the metrics below, we are getting a lot of traction with the young driver audience. Across 60 days, our videos have been viewed over 1.7m times, with 167,000 likes. With road safety content, audience engagement can be much harder than generating reach. Over the past two months, our content has been commented on 1,293 times, showing we’ve hit a note with our audience.

THE CHALLENGE

Many road safety agencies have a presence on Facebook, Instagram and even YouTube. However, a quick search shows that there are very few authorities currently using TikTok to reach young drivers. Why? Well, despite the huge potential, there are a few reasons why TikTok isn’t the easiest of platforms to setup and maintain. Here are a few:  

• Focus on original content
  Whereas Facebook and Instagram make it relatedly easy to share third party content with your friends and followers, TikTok is very much about original content creation. You can repost videos, but they aren’t shown on a traditional feed. So if you are serious about having a TikTok channel, you really need to be able to write, shoot and edit your own content.

• Engaging with audiences
  Although creating content it hard, it’s only 50% of the job. The other 50% is engaging with your audience when they comment on it. Your channel and your brand are judged on how you respond to comments, so getting this part of the strategy right is critical. This process can be very time consuming and understanding youth culture enough to judge the tone and content of responses can also be hard, even if you’re an expert in the subject matter.

• Effective local reach
  TikTok is built around the FYP (for you page), which is where viewers scroll through videos from channels/tags they follow and other content that the TikTok algorithm thinks they might like. This makes it very hard to target an audience geographically and although there are options for location tags, it’s typically hard to build a local audience.

• Approval for authority accounts
  For all the reasons mentioned above (and quite a few more!) public sector agencies are often averse to the idea of creating TikTok accounts. This means that there are currently very few sources of robust information and advice that could be considered a ‘credible source’.

THE SOLUTION

Despite the challenges for individual road safety agencies and local authorities, there is an obvious opportunity to create a nationwide young driver TikTok channel, funded and managed through collaboration with public and private sector partners. We are delighted and excited to be repurposing FirstCar’s channel to fill this role. 

Whilst FirstCar has needed to experiment with the tone and style of content to build an initial following, we can now pivot towards more overt road safety messaging that meets the needs of partners and uses data to produce material that addresses the most predominant risks facing young drivers. Led by established actor and presenter Keanan Lloyd-Adams, FirstCar has an established production capacity with young Gen-Z presenters, as well as collaborations with influencers. Our workflow harnesses this tried and tested method of content creation and audience engagement, whilst giving partners control on content and outreach strategy.

WORKFLOW

We will be creating two pieces of content each week and working in alignment with the Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter seasons to ensure we’re planning six months ahead. The process for each season looks like this:

• Virtual meeting with partners to agree on content for the season ahead.

• Write and share scripts with partners.

• Act on feedback.

• Produce and deploy content.

• Feedback to partners quarterly, with key metrics

• Repeat, ad infinitum!
  

MEASURING SUCCESS

There are many metrics available through the TikTok platform itself. These will be important in measuring our reach, saturation of key demographics and audience engagement. However, we must also be cognisant of the need to ensure our content is created using robust behaviour change methodology. We plan to allocate 10% of all shared costs to provide external counsel and independent evaluation of our impact on our young driver audience.

Here is an example of a recent video we’ve posted, with key metrics highlighted. As you’ll note, this post has been viewed 962,600 times, liked by 94,900 people, received 249 comments, 786 forwards and 4,700 bookmarks. Total play time has been in excess of 7,000 hours. 

COSTS AND COMMITMENT

We would like to work with as many partners as possible to make this project truly collaborative and scalable. As such, we will set the minimum annual contribution at only £1,000, with no ongoing commitment to support this project. We hope to deliver significant value to partners and grow over time, so we have no need to lock-in for an extended period.

The cost to produce two videos per week and manage the channel will be around £50,000 per year. FirstCar will bridge any funding gaps whilst we transition the channel to become a fully collaborative outlet for high-quality road safety focused content for new and young drivers.

PARTNERS

We are grateful to our partners, listed below, who have each invested £1,000pa into this collaborative TikTok channel.

• Safer Roads Greater Manchester

• Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership

• Safer Essex Roads Partnership

• Buckinghamshire Council

• IAM Roadsmart

• Driving for Better Business

• Wokingham Borough Council

• Cambridgeshire County Council

• Hertfordshire Road Safety Partnership

• Sussex Safer Roads Partnership (SSRP)

GET INVOLVED

If you would like to lend your support to this exciting project, or are interested in learning more, please contact James Evans on james@firstcar.co.uk or by calling 0203 468 1339.