You Cannot Sleep on TikTok Any Longer

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TikTok has over one billion active users around the world. If your team, institution, or organization is not on TikTok, you can’t wait any longer. Here are three reasons why, sprinkled with some new data from Student-Athlete Insights April 2022 Survey on Social Media.


#1 TikTok is the favorite social media for student-athletes. That’s right. After holding the top spot for the last few years, Snapchat finally tumbled, overtaken by TikTok.

The favorite social media for all of Gen Z are now (in order): TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. Nearly 90% of high school prospects and current student-athletes surveyed said they are on TikTok.

If you’re a Coach, Administrator, or brand in collegiate athletics and you’re not on TikTok, you’re not fishing where the fish are.


#2 TikTok’s growth shows no signs of slowing down. Let this sink in for a minute; you believe that Twitter and Snapchat are big social media companies, right? Well TikTok’s ad revenue in 2022 will be more than Twitter and Snapchat – combined!

And it’s not just ad growth; 64% of student-athletes I surveyed said they thought they’d post more in the coming months and/or become more active on the TikTok Marketplace.

One of the most common responses I hear from organizations who are slow to adopt a new social platform is that they fear it’s just the flavor of the month. It’s not. TikTok has found a winning formula for young people and advertisers know it. The platform is going to get a lot bigger and you need to be on it.


#3 The reasons for TikTok’s success are not gimmicky – they are at the core of Gen Z’s preferences.

The student-athletes I surveyed love TikTok. They spend an average of 45 minutes per day, watching videos. Nearly 70% said they post their own videos too. Why the “stickiness”?

TikTok is all about discovery. The app uses a unique algorithm to serve up only the most optimal content to a particular user. Other social media use based their content on connections between users, but TikTok focuses on content the app believes you will find most interesting. For example, if you love soccer and watch a few soccer videos, TikTok serves more of that content to you, regardless of whether you know the person who posted the video.