Probably a decent chunk of people don’t know Khaby, but he’s actually the second most followed guy on TikTok now and likely to be number one soon.
113 million TikTok followers
1.7 billion likes
47 million Instagram followers
1 billion monthly views
His background?
Got laid off from his job working at a factory in Italy during COVID and now makes $200,000 a month making videos.
His gimmick?
He does videos responding to DIY videos where he points out how stupid they are with visual demonstrations.
What makes him unique though.
Never talks…
Never says a word.
Never plays music with people speaking.
Never writes anything with a certain language.
His humor is 100% physical humor with facial and physical reactions.
Why this is important.
Only 15-20% of Facebook users come from primarily English speaking countries with the US, UK & Canada being the majority of that.
Instagram with a billion users has only about 20-25%being from English speaking countries.
TikTok, which now has a billion monthly users tying with Instagram, is only 15% from English speaking countries.
Big picture on this would be Facebook, which has 200 million American users, but 340 million Indian users. 10% of India does speak English, but none as a first language and Facebook’s growth in India expects it to have 3x as many Indian users as American users by 2030.
The important lesson to this for brands on social media.
Going global might mean going mute.
For something like Coca Cola or M&M’s, which are sold everywhere, the best goal would be to never say a word in viral content and have the only text be the actual packaging.
Another example for media brands would be the Peanuts.
The Peanuts sell over 50% of merchandise in Japan.
Japan only has about 12% of the population know some level of English.
It’d probably make sense that on social media, they try for shorts that don’t require English and are only music/animation, to appeal to everyone.
Khaby Lame is an interesting case, where for centuries the world has discussed the idea of a universal language.
That’s never going to happen, but this is proof the universal language for brands, entertainers and more, might be not speaking at all.