I hate TikTok. Your tenants might love it.

Should your building be on it?

*I've used “tenant” instead of “customer” in this essay for SEO. Forgive my hypocrisy, dear clients of mine.

My face was used to scam people on TikTok.

Not an AI-generated version of my face, but my actual face and my actual voice, lifted by some dodgy fraudsters from a recruiting video I made that went viral.

The video itself was pretty harmless - a recruitment ad for askChenai, my Zimbabwean BPO. However, the scammers reposted my video on their own account, running paid ads across Meta and TikTok. Under my talking head, instead of a link to our careers page, there was a link to a completely unrelated and very shady website.

They ran a recruitment scam, one where someone pays money to be “matched” with a remote job that never materialises. People fell for it - this is the world we now find ourselves in.

There’s a special place in hell for someone who would scam a jobseeker in Zimbabwe - they’re already broke (no shade). I've tried reporting this scammy account to no avail.

The whole situation confounded me, it's incredibly creepy.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering things like…who are they, these scammers? Is it a bot farm in China … or Russia? Or could it be a jilted ex, seeking revenge

Should I be scared? Flattered? Both?

How much money did the scammers even make from this? What are the underlying unit economics of such a business model? By the time they've paid for the ads to run, surely they'd really need to scam quite a lot of people before they turn a profit...and none of it is recurring revenue.

And … should I shave my head again? I do look great in the video..

Mostly I keep thinking that something like this would never happen on LinkedIn. Boring, respectable LinkedIn, the headquarters of NPCs who are always “pleased to announce”.

I have twice as many followers on TikTok than LinkedIn, which happened kind of accidentally.

Can you believe that it took only a few months for my TikTok follower to surpass the size of my LinkedIn, which at that point I had diligently nurtured for over 5 years? I'm a little resentful of that.

Where would I be today if I had only bet on a different horse? I could have been a big dawg like Khaby Lame ... or Andrew Tate.

Anyway, I use TikTok mainly for business because it's my main recruitment channel for askChenai. It's great, I don't have to pay for a job board. It’s dead easy to hit eyeballs on there. You've got a massive pool (1 billion users/day vs. 134 million users/day on LinkedIn). of people who are just doomscrolling (97 minutes/day vs 6 minutes/day on LinkedIn)

The best thing about TikTok is the instant validation - the crowd over there is carefree and they dish out follows and likes with abandon, unlike LinkedIn where everyone is a hyper-cautious lurker.

The problem is, outside of recruitment, I hardly ever use TikTok because I pretty much hate it.

Before you roll your eyes and call me an out of touch dinosaur, I know there’s more to TikTok than memes and trending dances. If you’re in the B2C game or politics, you’d be an idiot not to be all over it.

But I prefer the reading internet, for other people with attention spans. I’m a millennial who is nostalgic for places like Blogger, Tumblr and LiveJournal. Even when I watch videos, it’s on mute with captions on.

Posting business content on TikTok can also feel like casting pearls before swine. What if the algorithm sends me to another strange corner of the internet? Will I lose credibility if my serious ideas are sandwiched between memes and a crypto grifter?

In traditional media like newspapers and magazines, brands used to be really particular about where their ads appeared. Nobody wanted their glossy corporate ad stuck on the back page next to the ads for penile implants and sex lines. Chanel would never take a unit next to a Cash Converters.

Yes, I am comparing myself to Chanel.

Oh, have I mentioned that one of my TikTok posts went viral because people started making fun of my makeup?

One person said it looked like it was done by a toddler. That comment alone got 600 likes. Six hundred. And eighty replies. Most of which were just the 😂 emoji.

Guys, it wasn’t even a makeup tutorial.

That was my initiation into the pit that is TikTok. It’s Flea Bottom over there.

Of course, they underestimated who they were trying to bully. I’ll be damned if a bunch of losers think they can run me off the internet. Hold my f**ing beer. I doubled down and made even more videos with the exact same makeup.

But it was unsettling.

I can afford to avoid TikTok because, crucially, I can't reach my customers there.

The people who follow me on LinkedIn don't tend to be customer experience directors or real estate asset managers. My end goal is to use my platform to help grow my business, and there’s more value in me speaking to 5 thousand perfect buyers than one million people who find me funny but don’t care about real estate customer experience (or outsourcing to Zimbabwe).

My posts here typically reach around at least 2-3000 people, and 30% of my audience are senior leaders in real estate. It’s not made up - LinkedIn actually gives me those stats.

But just because my customers are on LinkedIn doesn't mean yours are.

I've noticed more real estate companies using TikTok, which is a deliberate engagement strategy

At RealService we manage social media for a lot of buildings and assets in the UK as part of our destination activation business line. I tend to keep an eye on what others are doing. Usually, we're managing LinkedIn or Meta, but I'm seeing an uptick in people using TikTok too.

A lot of it is the usual "come and visit us, look at all the great stuff we have on offer" type of content for campuses and destinations. But I've also seen some interesting campaigns for residential leasing, particularly build-to-rent. They're showing off all the great stuff happening in a building while inviting people to come and live there. And then there are incredibly targeted ads for things like flexible workspace.

Which brings me to what any of this means for real estate customer experience.

I often ask my clients,

“How do you actually engage with your tenants, besides your purely transactional interactions?”

A lot of them don't do very much. You can have the most brilliant property managers in the world, but if you are engaging in places where nobody is paying attention, what exactly are you doing?

Want to meet your customers where they are?

The question isn't whether your campus, building or shopping centre should be on TikTok, LinkedIn or anywhere else. It's whether you've actually bothered to find out where your tenants, both current and prospective, are paying attention in the first place.

If you’re looking to deliver your customer experience programme - that’s what we do.

At RealService, we develop and manage real estate customer engagement and experience programmes for clients across residential, office, retail, industrial and mixed use real estate.

That might mean social media and communications, events and community activation, or a broader programme. If this sounds like something you need, let’s talk.

To learn more about RealService: https://www.real-service.com/

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