How a Dollar General Employee Went Viral on TikTok
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The Dollar General employee who went viral on TikTok is no stranger to the internet.
We went to the New York-based company’s corporate headquarters to chat with employees, vendors, and other industry people in the fast-moving grocery store company.
In March 2017, a Dollar General employee went viral on TikTok, in a meme that got over a million views in just a few hours.
That’s not unusual. According to the social media analytics firm Chartbeat, up to 72 percent of TikTok videos have views of over 100,000. And there are more than 800 million tweets, Instagram posts, and Facebook posts uploaded to the platform every single day.
Here’s what we learned by talking to people at Dollar General’s corporate offices in New York:
TikTok is a powerful platform for brands to spread their messages. The company has used it to share videos of the “TikTok Friday” meme featuring an employee from an all-night pizza shop in St. Louis, which has more than 130 million fans on the service.
Dollar General employees also are used to sharing videos on social media. Here’s Doreen, a company official who gave us her first name, as she was scrolling through TikTok videos on the company’s internal app. As she started to search for a video of an elderly woman wearing a tux to celebrate Valentine’s Day, her eyes lit up. When she typed dollar general into the search bar, Doreen found a video of a woman, wearing a $20 tuxedo, singing the popular “Happy Birthday” song to a 10-year-old girl on stage.
Dollar General employees are also comfortable on TikTok, a platform in which employees are encouraged to use their real photos, real names, and hashtags on brand accounts. “We’re a really fun place,” says Jason, a Dollar General employee who used his real name in this video. “No one’s gonna judge you.”