Why TikTok Is No Longer App for Teens Only and Is Now #1 Platform for Brands?

TikTok has experienced tremendous growth in the times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it seems that there is much more to come. Due to the global quarantine and vast amount of spare time, people have had a chance to explore TikTok and not only grasp the idea but also make the most out of the app.

Initially popular among the youngsters only, TikTok is now widely used by people of all ages. It’s no longer an app primarily focused on teens. TikTok’s user base significantly aged up with the pandemic. Thus it made TikTok much more attractive for many brands and for creative branded influencer activations.

Here are 10 reasons that explain why TikTok is now #1 platform for brands:

1. Tiktok generated "the most downloads for any app ever in a quarter" in Q1 2020. In March, as most Americans began to shelter at home, TikTok's global downloads jumped 51 percent year-over-year to 199 million, per Sensor Tower.
2. In November 2018, TikTok reported 20 million monthly active users in the United States. With the staggering growth that’s occurred since then, Wallaroo estimates that the current number of monthly active TikTok users in the U.S. is about 65 million.
3. According to Comscore, which only tracks users 18 and over, the percentage of U.S.-based TikTok users age 18-24 fell from 41.1% in January to 35.3% in April, a 5.8% drop. During that same time period, the share of 25- to 34-year-olds rose from 22.4% to 27.4%, and the 35-44 demographic grew from 13.9% to 17.1%.
4. Average time spent on the app among U.S. users during the month was at a record 858 minutes, or more than 14 hours, according to Comscore.

5. TikTok takes the 9th place among social network sites and is ahead of the better-known LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat.

6. TikTok is the first app after Facebook’s marquee app, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger to break past the 2 billion downloads figure since January 1 of 2014, a Sensor Tower official told TechCrunch.

7. TikTok is by far one of the world’s most downloaded apps in recent years, having surpassed both the one billion and 1.5 billion downloads on the App Store and Google Play in a single year (2019).

8. While there are multiple ways to calculate engagement rate, Cloutmeter indicates that TikTok users average a healthy 52.1% engagement.

9. TikTok has the highest follower engagement rates across 100,000 user profiles sampled in an online research project by .

10. TikTok’s reach is truly impressive - the app has already entered over 150 markets around the world and is avaliable in 39 languages.

Key insights:

TikTok’s growth in the U.S. during quarantine and the fact that millennials are making up a greater share of its user base quickly made TikTok the #1 platform for brands and influencer integrations.

We’ve personally got a lot of requests for TikTok influencer discovery since the beginning of the pandemic as many brands saw the explosive growth of the app and the opportunity to use it as a platform for reaching new older audiences.

Some brands were pleasantly surprised by the organic posts integrating their products that went viral and became instantly interested in doing more influencer integrations on the platform. For example, Brumate got a ton of buzz around the brand generated by the video shot by Nicki Baber that was viewed by more than 2.3 million people.

Check out the leading Influencer Discovery tool with the biggest selection of TikTok influencers here. Our AI-powered algorithm analyzes 1,000,000,000+ of social media profiles in real-time to identify influencers (from micro to macro) across all social networks with your target audience.