ECOM Presents TikTok Campaign “We Are Alike” at AIDS 2024

The 25th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2024) is taking place in Munich from 22 to 26 July 2024.

Today, on July 23, ECOM's communications officer Tina Sobko presented to the participants of the conference her poster “Increasing visibility and changing points of view: Lessons from the TikTok We Are Alike campaign for trans communities in the context of HIV/AIDS.”

The We Are Alike campaign was initiated by trans people in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) region and implemented with the support of ECOM. It aims to increase the visibility of the trans community and reduce the vulnerability of trans people to HIV/AIDS. The project is particularly relevant due to the fact that in the EECA region, trans people are often left out of targeted prevention programs. The campaign sought to fill this gap by increasing visibility and promoting positive attitudes towards trans people.

The second wave of the campaign, launched in 2023, featured content created exclusively by trans people sharing their personal stories. The target audience of the campaign was cisgender women aged 18–35, and the main goal was to transform neutral or undefined attitudes towards the trans community into positive ones. The results of the campaign are impressive: the 20 selected videos collected 5 million views and reached 3.2 million unique users. The TikTok platform has become a space for active dialogue, as evidenced by more than 14,000 comments.

“We saw that user-generated content on social networks is effective for combating stereotypes and that constant interaction is important for changing perceptions. The campaign not only increased the visibility of the trans community, but also initiated constructive discussions, becoming a valuable resource for spreading information,” said Tina Sobko.

The We Are Alike campaign set a new standard for the use of social media in public health, emphasizing the importance of user-generated narratives to promote inclusivity and understanding. ECOM plans to continue using the TikTok platform as a space for interaction and dialogue to ensure the long-term impact of the campaign.