Platform-wide Perspectives

Social listening to monitor entire social platforms

Within the social media analytics space, there's a lot of differentiation (and tools) between "social listening" and "brand monitoring." Analysts typically turn to brand monitoring tools when tracking owned content (i.e., a Coca-Cola analyst tracking how well their most recent campaign performed). At the same time, researchers use social listening tools if they want to find trends in an audience or industry (i.e., a brand strategist trying to figure out how 24-year-olds think about soda).

Today, we show you a new use case - using our new product, Infegy Starscape, to monitor an entire platform simultaneously. Companies typically can't do this because of the massive infrastructure requirements to review a platform in total. They rely on targeted queries and sampled posts to give you an "illusion" of listening to your requested audience.

Infegy Starscape does things differently. We'll look at a dataset with an enormous size (1.52 billion posts across TikTok and Instagram) to show you how the conversation and audience on TikTok are inherently different from Instagram.

This type of platform-level understanding is unique within social listening (and social media space in general). Platforms loathe providing usage numbers themselves lest they show declining usage, which translates to poor stock performance. By relying on third-party datasets like Infegy’s, you can gain data-driven insights into how people themselves are using social media platforms: this allows you to make advertising purchasing decisions, instead of blindly dumping money into Meta or TikTok ads.

Comparing engagement across platforms

First, we'll look at how users engage with content across platforms. Engagement is a crucial metric for any advertising agency or brand strategist who wants to see content resonate with an audience. Audiences show their emotion by liking, sharing, or commenting on content pieces.

Our comparison set is from the last six months(n = 1.5 billion posts), we conclude that Instagram and TikTok have disparate average engagement metrics. Instagram posts have almost twice the average number of likes and many more average numbers of comments per post than TikTok videos. We explain this via Instagram's larger Influence average. Lower influence scores are often independent authors posting to personal pages, while high influence scores are often major news outlets with a large audience and increased connectivity.

Next, we'll take a look at the topics themselves that are rising to the top of the pile on both platforms. Content from Bangladesh and Nepal dominate TikTok's top topics, even with an English filter applied. These types of wacky topic distributions sometimes happen on social networks. For example, in Twitter's early days, Brazilian Justin Bieber fans often took over the trending topics pages. Instagram, on the other hand, has a much more diverse topic set and is better for an ad buy.

These disparate scores, engagement metrics, and content show that if you're looking for smaller communities, TikTok is your best bet. On the other hand, if you're looking for a broader reach, Instagram could be the better platform to invest your ad budget.

To read the entire insight brief, please visit our website!