How social media TikTok could multiply farmers’ income, China shows the way

In most of the countries, TikTok is used primarily for entertainment. The users share funny videos but Chinese farmers are using the platform to reach out customers.

Social media platform TikTok is not just a platform of sharing funny videos, it could also be used in multiplying income of the farmers. This innovative use of TikTok has been successfully demonstrated by Chinese farmers.

There farmers are using this technology to reach out their customers particularly in cities for direct sale of their farm produce. They record the videos of their farm produce and post it on TikTok by mentioning rates and other details of the products. Interestingly, India which 120 million active users primarily uses TikTok only to vent out frustration and share funny videos. There is hardly any success story of using TikTok for business purposes or facilitating farmers in selling their farm produce on time and getting more money.

TikTok as platform for selling agricultural produce

Ma Gongzuo is such a celebrity farmer in China. She has 737,000 followers on Douyin, the Chinese version of popular video-sharing app TikTok that has 400 million users in the country and has turned Ma into something of a celebrity. Creating videos has become a popular sales tactic for Chinese farmers: the clips show increasingly discerning consumers the origins of the product and provide a window into rural life that captures audience imagination. For some, it has helped them find a way out of poverty, which the ruling Communist party hopes to eradicate by 2020.

Today, Ma drives an expensive car and has already earned enough to buy the property and help his parents and fellow villagers with their homes and businesses. In 2015, Ma took on the family honey-producing business in the verdant hills of Zhejiang province, and thanks to e-commerce apps, managed to turn a yearly revenue of 1 million yuan ($142,000).

Videos of Life in Farm

As the sales began to stagnate, Ma in November 2018, with help from his friends in the village, he began posting videos about his life on the farm. They showed him opening up a hive surrounded by a swarm of bees, swimming bare-chested in a river, and chopping wood. "I never advertise my products. I show my daily life, the landscapes of the countryside. That's what interests people," Ma says. "Of course people suspect that I'm selling honey. But they decide to get in touch with me to say they want to buy some." Like most transactions in China, where hard cash is less and less popular, the orders are paid through apps like WeChat or AliPay. Ma says he now sells between 2 and 3 million yuan ($285,000- $428,000) worth of honey each year, as well as dried sweet potato and brown sugar. "When I was young we were poor," he recalls, adding: "At school, I used to admire other kids who had pocket money because I never had any." Now he drives a 4x4 BMW that cost around 760,000 yuan ($108,000) and has also invested in building a B&B. "Using Douyin, that was the turning point," he says.