Ignoring political noise, TikTok works to shore up place in organic social hierarchy

Its nascent Market Scope tool, which brings together paid and organic monitoring tools into a single dashboard, is chief among those efforts. It’s intended to grant brands a “view of how customers are moving through the funnel … to be able to better target their efforts, whether they’re organic or paid,” according to Rema Vasan, head of North America marketing at TikTok.

TikTok’s (organic) social standing

The application was designed for brands like McDonald’s and soft drink brand Poppi, both of which wield their organic presence in conjunction with paid social activity. 

In Poppi’s case, co-founder and chief brand officer Allison Ellsworth said the company had even launched and restored limited-edition products based on TikTok user feedback. Its holidays-themed “Cranberry Fizz” line, for example, first launched in November 2023. “It was supposed to just be a fun LTO for holidays. We didn’t think much of it,” said Ellsworth.

Stock quickly sold out, however, and “FOMO” gripped Poppi customers. Following intense demand — expressed by TikTok users in comments and in their own video posts addressed to the brand — the company reintroduced the product to shelves. It’s now a regular seasonal addition to its lineup, a decision Ellsworth credits entirely to the brand’s TikTok community rather than traditional market research data. “The main driver is what our consumer and our community is saying about us,” she said.

McDonald’s went through a similar experience this year, when it brought back the Snack Wrap – a previous menu item that was discontinued in 2016 and brought back April 2025 in part due to TikTok user feedback. (Is this the new McRib in terms of its cult following?)

For the QSR chain, TikTok is second only to Meta’s platforms in its organic social hierarchy, said Kaylah Burton, social strategy director at McDonald’s agency of record, Wieden+Kennedy.

The platform is a crucial means of reaching younger Gen Z (born 1997-2012) consumers, said Amanda Mulligan, director of social media and influencer at McDonald’s. “We’re trying to strategically show up in the places where they’re spending most of their time, and that’s definitely TikTok,” she said. 

“It’s the best focus group. We can put out a piece of content, we can seed something, and we’ll immediately get a real-time reaction, and we’ll know quickly if it’s resonating with our fans or if it’s not,” Mulligan added.

Ellsworth and Mulligan’s experiences with community feedback around product launches serve as reminders that organic social can go far beyond addressing PR or mere brand maintenance – it’s a conduit for customer loyalty. “The comment section powers the future of the brand,” said Burton.

Linking organic and paid

TikTok has long benefited from blurring of lines between paid and organic social. “It’s always been very easy on Tiktok to use one of your organic videos as your ad, or to cross-post your ad to organic,” said Olamma Nzeribe-Williams, social activation manager at Media by Mother. 

And TikTok’s executives have spent years banging the drum for brands to put time and resources into organic content; recall its original pitch to the ad market suggested marketers “Don’t Make Ads, Make TikToks”. That hasn’t changed the fact that organic social is sometimes regarded as the middle child of digital marketing: occasionally noteworthy, as in the case of Duolingo or a cultural tie-in, but typically set aside for serious conversations. 

But the channel isn’t just useful for brands looking to boost their presence or multiply the effects of their paid spend on a given platform. Increasingly, it’s playing a role in their search strategy. TikTok added a long-awaited search ads product in October, and since June Instagram posts have been indexable in Google Search for brand accounts that opt-in – meaning they are also influencing the LLMs behind zero-click search engines, such as Google’s Gemini. Those developments add gravity to organic social efforts.

Given it’s in an invite-only alpha stage in the U.S. and Europe, it’s too early to see whether Market Scope furnishes TikTok with a killer app for organic the same way that Meta’s Advantage suite has helped it burnish its long-standing edge in paid social. Nzeribe-Williams said she was waiting to use the tool, while Ellsworth and Mulligan hadn’t yet tested it; a TikTok spokesperson declined to say how many advertisers had begun using the tool since its U.S. launch in June.

But interest is high. And marketers and agency practitioners will take any help they can get with community management. “We go through every TikTok comment, we’re screenshotting them, we’re watching every piece of UGC, and we’re compiling all of the requests that they make,” said Burton. 

Alongside features intended to strengthen TikTok’s performance marketing capabilities, Market Scope includes a sentiment analysis feature that automatically scores comments on video posts as positive or negative. The tool can be used to compare average comment scores with those of category peers, too – potentially giving practitioners a means of automating the Sisyphean community management tasks.

The unspoken hope is that in making the platform an easier, more effective tool for organic, brands will follow through with more paid investment.