TikTok this week took the latest in a series of ongoing steps towards becoming a local discovery engine. Its new Nearby Feed filters videos and topics, based on what’s happening near a given user. This joins past local efforts, such as place reviews and the organic use of its app for local search.
Before getting into those broader evolutionary steps and how they led up to this week’s move, what is the Nearby Feed all about? Meant to inspire discovery of local places and activities, it’s a standalone feed within TikTok that’s purpose-built for locality. It features places (think: restaurants) near a given user.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because TikTok was spotted testing this feature back in 2022. As we wrote then, this is an effort to build a location layer on TikTok as an additional relevancy trigger. Similar efforts are being made by social apps ranging from Snap Map to Instagram’s ongoing mapping efforts.
As we theorized at the time of the 2022 leak, TikTok is pulling this off through its existing taxonomy and discovery engine. TikTok is known for its prowess as a discovery engine through behavioral targeting. This takes the same principle and targets content – via tags or place of origin – to users’ locations.
Surface Area
In addition to location, TikTok’s other relevance triggers and ranking factors will be at work in any given user’s Nearby Feed. That includes the topics they’ve watched/liked, as well as other influential factors like recency. These are the factors we know about, while others lie in the algorithmic secret sauce.
TikTok was keen to point out the creator angle as well. The Nearby Feed could be one way that they can boost engagement for their videos, as their public posts now have more surface area to occupy. When geographically and topically relevant, those posts will show up in the Nearby Feeds of the right users.
Reading between the lines, this also incentivizes creators to tag their posts more religiously, which aligns with TikTok’s goal for a more extensive taxonomy. Those tags are the lifeblood of its ability to surface the right content for users – whether it be location relevance, topical, or shopping-related (another article).
A pervasive taxonomy has another key function: ad targeting. Given that advertising is TikTok’s core business, targeting is a critical function. Location tags, topical tags, and product-based tags (e.g., TikTok Shop) help it programatically determine context, and thus place sponsored content more effectively.
Good Business
While we’re speculating on how this move aligns with TikTok’s business goals, the draw of the Nearby Feed could motivate users to share their location with the app. That in turn boosts TikTok’s ability to be a more effective discovery engine for users, and a stronger targeting engine for creators and advertisers.
That last part may sound underhanded, but we don’t mean it that way. It’s good business, and the name of the game in local search and discovery – as long as content is indeed relevant. TikTok is also following privacy/opt-in best practices while barring content from private accounts and minors in the Nearby Feed.
Back to the part about TikTok’s growing role as a local search engine, this phenomenon emerged last year, when Gen-Z started to turn to TikTok en masse to search for local businesses… at the expense of Google. TikTok says that 46 percent of users have visited a local business they saw on the platform.
So you can think of this week’s move as leaning into that behavior and wrapping some structure around it. As for where to find it, the Nearby Feed will be represented as a tab, prominently placed on the TikTok home screen. It launches first in the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany, with other locales likely to follow.
