Meet the MUMS of TikTok

Once reserved for gen Z, the world’s fastest growing video-sharing app is being infiltrated by a new demographic: mums. And as the world bunkers down at home, they’ve truly found their audience.

- Amy Nelmes Bissett

Dressed neatly in a plain white T-shirt and wrap skirt, Melanie Greenwood props her phone on the windowsill in the hallway of her home in Holland Park West, Brisbane, and presses record. Joined by her 14-year-old niece, Macey, she starts bopping about to techno beats, giggling through a short choreographed dance routine. The performance is far from perfect, and at one point Melanie’s husband walks into the shot looking baffled.

Afterwards, the 36-year-old mum-of-two posts the video on TikTok without much thought – she’s recently joined the app at the insistence of her social-media-obsessed niece.

Fast forward 24 hours and the clip has been watched by more than two million users worldwide. Two days later, it jumps to five million views.

That was in December 2019, and today the video stands at more than nine million views. “It increases every few days,” says Melanie, a former beauty salon owner who goes by the handle @melgreenwoodbeauty83. “I still don’t know why it went viral.”

For the uninitiated, TikTok is the latest social media app to take grip. Created in 2017 by Chinese company ByteDance, it’s the fastest-growing video-sharing platform in the world. Last year it was the second most downloaded app globally. It now has almost 2 billion users in 154 countries.