TikTok’s rapid growth has caused older consumers and industry experts to scratch their heads. Leaked audio of a July internal meeting showed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg comparing TikTok with Instagram’s Explore tab—a place where users can discover personalized content from Instagram. That caused observers to question whether Zuckerberg fully understood the app and if Facebook could maintain its dominance. To be fair, TikTok’s algorithmically driven “For You” tab also shows personalized content, but the makeup of the content (often 15-second selfie-style videos) bears little resemblance to Instagram.
Despite that, Facebook has stayed well ahead. As the Morning Consult study shows, it is still used by a greater percentage of young users than TikTok, though it is losing users in the 12 to 24 age group, according to our latest forecast. Then there’s sister-app Instagram, which will continue to make up for Facebook’s losses among younger US generations.
But time spent on Facebook is declining, and the growing popularity of TikTok may help to explain why. Instead of sharing status updates, photos and links to articles (the type of content that typically appears in a user’s Facebook News Feed), TikTok users create content primarily to entertain their audiences.
In December 2019, TikTok released the TikTok 100, its ranking of the top videos, genres, creators and memes over the past year. The list gives deeper insight into what exactly makes TikTok tick: fun, lighthearted content like a video of someone trying Kombucha for the first time or a man performing surgery on a banana—all set to background music, of course.
That’s in stark contrast to traditional social networks like Facebook, which tend to be more serious and at times, negative. In fact, too much negativity was one of the leading reasons that US Facebook users ages 13 and older were using Facebook less in a May 2019 survey by Edison Research, cited by 59%. Not liking rants or too personal comments was the most-cited response.