NEW YORK – Making TikTok content for brands is the hot new gig.

As the social media platform continues to explode in popularity, brands are hiring college students and other young people – sometimes with pay and sometimes with college credits – to help them navigate the app, which can confuse newcomers with its trending voice snippets and song clips, unique vernacular and endless videos.

Job sites have recently been peppered with listings for “TikTok content creator interns”, who are being asked to make and appear in videos promoting tropical ice cream, sunflower seeds, bubble tea, malls and more.

The hope is to connect with young people and even what some marketers call “Generation Zalpha” – combining the generations born after the mid-1990s with those born in 2010 and beyond – and ultimately drive sales.

Whole Foods and luggage company Travel Pro recently posted job ads for interns to help them build their presence on TikTok.

A marketing agency in Dallas has been seeking a student to be its “chief TikTok officer” during the summer to help its clients with the app.

And the Rosedale Centre, a mall in Roseville, Minnesota, just hired two TikTok creator interns after successfully introducing the role last year.

Marketers have long turned to young people to help them navigate new social platforms. But their efforts around TikTok are unique, partly because interns are becoming the face of those brands.

The companies are keen to figure out an app that beat Instagram and Snapchat to become the most frequently used social media channel by 12- to 17-year-olds, according to a Forrester Research survey last year.

And in the past couple of years, some brands like Duolingo and Hasbro’s Nerf have hired people in Generation Z as full-time employees to take charge of their TikTok accounts, but they are not the norm.

And the younger generation appears interested.

Frutero, a tropical fruit ice cream brand founded in May 2020, said it was inundated with more than 250 applications after advertising its TikTok creator internship. (Desired skills included “humour and meme-making abilities.”)

Although Frutero has only three full-time employees, it was considering hiring three or four interns to make TikTok videos based on so much interest in the job, said Mr Vedant Saboo, a co-founder. NYTIMES