As TikTok eyes the next stage of its development, providing options for creators to make money from their TikTok clips is key to maximizing its success. If creators can’t make money on TikTok, they’ll find ways to monetize their audience on other platforms. And in TikTok’s case, that process is going to involve providing direct link options to enable creators, and businesses, to drive traffic and sales direct from the app.

As it’s slowly working towards this, as demonstrated by this latest in-app update.

As you can see in this image shared by social media expert Matt Navarra, TikTok has started rolling out a new integration with recipe app Whisk, which enables creators of food videos to post a link to the relevant recipe, which is then overlaid on the video clip via a ‘See full recipe’ CTA. TikTok confirmed the new integration to TechCrunch. 

That provides more opportunity for food creators to drive traffic to their Whisk profile, and build their audience, while it’ll also help boost traffic for Whisk. But that could be just the start – while right now, TikTok only has a direct link with Whisk, it could soon facilitate more linking options, to other apps, or other URLs, giving users even more ways to boost their business opportunities directly from their short video clips.

This isn’t the first time that TikTok has enabled the addition of external links from videos.

Back in October 2019, TikTok added the option for users to include Wikipedia links on their clips, adding more contexual info, while it tested a further expansion of that functionality to include links to Yelp and TripAdvisor last March. 

TikTok has also tried direct links to external stores to drive eCommerce traffic.

None of this is surprising, as TikTok is largely following the lead of its Chinese counterpart, called Douyin, which already generates the majority of its revenue from in-stream commerce via in-app links. 

Indeed, TikTok recently briefed advertisers on its coming eCommerce integrations, which will include tools that will facilitate product linking, with creators automatically earning a commission on any sales. TikTok also hosted a live-stream shopping integration with Walmart back in December.​

Essentially, TikTok needs to expand its platform to facilitate such activity in order to provide more direct benefit to creators and business, and build a business ecosystem within the app. As such, you can expect to see a lot more tap-through links and tools coming to your TikTok clips, providing more options to act on what you see – and more ways for brands to drive traffic from their efforts.

This new Whisk integration is just one of many that will be coming to the app.