Here’s the thing about TikTok—sometimes you have to be able to make fun of yourself to succeed. The best thing about it is that no one is exempt from that, and Hilary Duff took full advantage of it in a new TikTok trend centered around quite the...INTERESTING dance moves.
It all started when people started pointing out how some of Hilary’s choreography from her talk show performance days was cringey. One of the most shared ones comes from her 2007 performance of her song “With Love” on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Users were then recreating the dance with the duet feature and it kind of blew up from there. Eventually, Hilary decided to get in on the fun and post her own recreation.
@hilaryduff #duet with @yungdaddycack HERE YOU GOOOOOOOO!
♬ original sound - Devin Santiago
First of all, I think she killed this. She’s actually better now than she was in the original video and it kind of makes me want to rewatch all of her other performance videos from her younger days (and now I can’t get “What Dreams Are Made Of” out of my head). It’s one of TikTok’s favourite things to see a trend come full circle like this which is why it went viral with 7.6 million views at the time of writing this. But as we all know at this point, every move by a celebrity is calculated, and since Hilary’s new project How I Met Your Father is underway, this is a great moment for her to start building that momentum, especially after the disappointment of the Lizzie McGuire reboot being dropped. We don’t have a release date for the new series yet, but this is a good time for her to start engaging with fans on platforms like TikTok so it’s a gradual climb. This is some solid preliminary work that will help her name be put in people’s mouths so that when the show does come out, she’s already on our minds. Being able to laugh at herself while also showing that she still got that star quality goes well with the fact that HIMYF is a comedy.
We continue to see celebrities use TikTok to elevate their promotional game. Taylor Swift has been pulling in some crazy numbers on the app in the past few weeks in the lead-up and release of Red (Taylor’s Version), leaning into her own celebrity and her own celebrity connections to increase her TikTok popularity.
@taylorswift OH NO @selenagomez #snl #swifttok
♬ Oh no my bestie is a bad b - Luke Franchina
@taylorswift NEW MUSIC VIDEO TOMORROW at 10am ET 🚨 #redtaylorsversion #swifttok
♬ ladies and gentlemen whats new - xxtristanxo
Lady Gaga also made her appearance on TikTok just as House of Gucci promo was ramping up. Her first TikTok was a fabulous video of her lip synching to an excerpt from the movie.
@ladygaga #HouseOfGucci 💜
♬ original sound - ladygaga
There’s no surprise that she has created an original trend with the sound (because she’s literally Lady Gaga), and I’m sure we’ll start seeing more and more people use it when the movie is released. However, the second video she posted uses a sound that is a current TikTok trend.
@ladygaga I’m definitely the drama
♬ I am a Socialist - Brandons.Sounds
It is way more laid back when it comes to the filming because she’s just lip synching to the audio while getting her makeup done. That video has almost five million more views than the first.
Every app has its thing, and people on TikTok want to see celebrities participate in viral trends made by normal people, which is why just being a celebrity on the app won’t get them the highest amount of hype possible. Hilary Duff was able to make that connection here and slide into exactly the right space between being celebrity herself and a celebrity participant engaging with everyone else, and that’s why she’s gone TikTok viral.
