The rise of TikTok has been nothing short of meteoric, and while the social media platform has faced controversies related to potentially harvesting data for the Chinese government, its popularity continues to increase unabated. For example, the British legislative assembly recently suspended its own TikTok account for fear of leaking sensitive data to a foreign power, but in spite of the fact that this is the case the citizens of the island nation have been using TikTok more and more frequently as of late.
TikTok is now the best performing social media platform out there in terms of average time spent by users, with British consumers spending an average of 49 minutes on it per day. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that this has put it in the lead ahead of Facebook, whose average time spent fell to 43 minutes this year after reaching a high of 47 minutes in 2020.
TikTok has also turned into yet another competitor that is giving Snapchat a run for its money, turning into the third most popular social media platform in the UK after taking this position from Snapchat. Both Instagram and Snapchat have seen a muted rate of growth in terms of average user time spent, with both platforms being stuck at 29 and 25 minutes per day respectively.
It is estimated that the total number of British users who use TikTok will go up to 21.1 million by 2026, which would represent about half of all mobile users in the island nation. This is resulting in a whopping 192% increase in TikTok’s in app revenue from British users, and as it enters the social commerce arena this rate of revenue will have nowhere to go but up.
The UK is lagging behind in social commerce, which leaves TikTok well poised to introduce the concept to the market before its better established competitors such as Facebook and Instagram get the chance to. Britain is only behind China in terms of ecommerce adoption, and that creates the perfect storm for TikTok to make its entry.
