Insights on TikTok: who uses it, what for and where are they from?

To forget these preconceived notions, we have dived into TikTok. From this research some very enlightening insights have emerged.

Read carefully because your perception of the platform may change radically when you finish this series of posts we have prepared for you.

It is repeated endlessly that TikTok is a network for teenagers, but, is it true? 

We should not confuse the fact that it is especially attractive to them -something that is undoubtedly true- with the fact that it is a channel with a segmentation exclusively oriented to this segment.

If we look at the age range shown by Statista in this study, we see that, indeed, the largest range is between the ages of 10 and 19, but the next 3 add up to more than 60%.

Its growth is absolutely exponential. It has been rising for years in terms of critical mass, but the last few months have been definitive in driving these results.

According to data provided by studies such as this one by Hootsuite, in April 2021 this network exceeded 730 million monthly active users globally.

Of course, it is far from Facebook's network. Only the main network of Zuckerberg's company already exceeds TikTok by more than 2 billion monthly users, and is also widely surpassed by Whatsapp and Instagram. But this is not what is important.

What is really relevant in a case like TikTok's is to evaluate the pace of growth, and this is unquestionable.

As you may already know, behind TikTok is a Chinese group. The name of this company is BytDance Ltd. based in Beijing.

But, obviously, this does not mean that TikTok users are necessarily Chinese. In fact, this platform is the Western version of their social network since, within their borders, they use another name: Douyin. By the way, if you go back to the Sensor Tower screenshot, you will see that it has a more than respectable number of users.

Despite the obstacles that some governments, such as the US government, have tried to put in its way, we can find this application in over 155 countries and 75 different languages.

TikTok has a large user base in the United States, India - from where 28% of its users come from - South America and Europe in general (17 million users in the United Kingdom, 11 in France, 10, 7 in Germany...). 

In fact, it is still a social network, so it shares most of the uses that these have. That is: sharing and interacting with a community.

That said, it is true that it has some important differences. It is a video network, so the logical association is to compare it to YouTube, but in reality it is quite far from Google's network.

It has become a standard of its own, somewhere between video repositories and Instagram Stories (not to mention the blatant copy that is Reels). The challenge is to tell stories in less than a minute.

The content, in general, is much more creative because TikTok is used to do it, not just to edit the basic variables or add a description to the video.

Comedy and music have always triumphed, but little by little, we are seeing how other types of topics are gaining ground, such as cooking recipes, activism, spread on any topic... The key is always to manage the storytelling to generate complete reproductions.