Relevant indicators like post frequency, hashtag use, and engagement rates? On it.

Analytical breakdowns by, say, sector or number of followers? Definitely, positively.

Inspirational video content for your company from in-depth profiles of top performers? Oh, right.

Important Lessons Learned From Comparing TikTok to the Competition

By a wide margin, TikTok is the most popular social media platform among teens.

TikTok’s 4.1% engagement rate per follower is significantly higher than Instagram’s 0.03% and far surpasses the 0.02% earned by the median brand on either Facebook or Twitter.

The names you mention have an impact

Companies see an increase in video views and comments when they include mentions, and you can bet that those mentions also contribute to a rise in the number of people who choose to follow the brand in question.

Three categories consistently rank at the top: health and beauty, universities, and sports clubs.

Since these fields also tend to perform well on the other social networks we analyse, it’s not surprising that their content is resonating with TikTok users.

TikTok has seen a decrease in brand content production in comparison to other platforms.

Brands are clearly still ramping up posting on TikTok, as the average brand only posts 1.8 videos per week.

Weekly Average Number of Videos Uploaded to TikTok

Rates of Weekly TikTok Video Production
About 1.8 brand videos per week, or 8 per month, is published on average.

On average, the top 25% of the most active brands published videos at least five times per week.
Thirty percent of brands only release content once a week or less.
The Average Number of Videos Uploaded to TikTok Each Week: Total Assets

The more followers you have, the more posts you’ll make on average.

We found that the smallest subset we looked at (1K-5K followers) uploaded a video once per week.
Social media profiles with over a million followers typically update their feeds three times weekly.

Percentage of Viewers Engaged

One of the most reliable indicators of a video’s popularity and quality on TikTok is its Engagement Rate per View. Why? Your content’s appeal can be calculated by dividing the number of times it was liked, commented on, or shared by the total number of views. Your engagement rate per view will be lower if viewers didn’t find your video to be particularly interesting or controversial. If your video caught their eye, they’ll be more likely to stick around for the next bit of content rather than just swiping away.

Audience Size Relative to Number of Followers

Since the For You Page has joined the conversation, viewers who aren’t already following you will be exposed to your videos as the TikTok algorithm works quickly to serve up videos it predicts will be popular. Brands need to make sense of how videos are being viewed by followers and non-followers alike, and comparing the number of views on a brand’s videos to the number of followers is a helpful engagement metric for doing so.

Follower Participation Rate

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read a Rival IQ benchmark report in the past that our most popular engagement metric also appears on TikTok. Users can adjust for the size of their audience by viewing the engagement rate per follower. While 200 likes may seem like a lot to a brand with only 2,000 followers, that number may seem insignificant to a brand with 200,000 followers. This highlights the importance of looking beyond the raw numbers of engagement.

Gain in Average Monthly Fans

The popularity of TikTok has skyrocketed over the past few years and shows no signs of slowing down, making it important for businesses to track their own progress in this area.

TikTok brands of all sizes are growing their monthly follower count by at least 2%.

Those with fewer than 50,000 followers are growing by more than 5% each month on average.
A monthly growth rate of 2.5% or more was observed among the larger accounts in this analysis.

Video Hashtags

To increase the likelihood of having their content featured on TikTok’s front page (#FYP), brands are using hashtags to attract viewers and provide a hint as to the content’s subject matter.

In general, brands use about four hashtags per video.

Only 34% of brands use 5 or more hashtags in their videos, indicating a trend towards minimalism.
Less than one hashtag is used by 15% of brands when posting videos online.

Videos Including Discussions

TikTok may not be as good as Twitter for encouraging interaction between users and brands, but users still do a lot of mentioning. Mentioning another handle in a video is an effective way to increase exposure, whether in response to a comment or in an effort to attract the attention of a favourite TikToker.

On average, only 14.5 percent of videos from brands include mentions of other accounts.