The Best Social Media Platform for Your Brand’s Video Marketing [Infographic]

Any marketer worth their salt knows that creating video content is an important part of a brand’s marketing strategy, but knowing where to spend your effort and budget can be daunting. If you’re wondering where you should concentrate your video marketing efforts, look no further. In this infographic, we’ll be drilling down on some of the most important stats for the three main video-centric social media platforms - TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube - so you know the best way to move forward with your video content creation. 

Internet Usage in 2022

For most of us, it’s hard to picture what life would be like without access to the internet, but internet-free regions still exist. However, these regions are dwindling as our 21st-century digital way of life continues to creep faster and faster into these rural and impoverished areas of the globe. So much so that internet usage reached crazy new heights in 2021. Looking forward, forecasts state that 12.5 trillion hours are expected to be spent surfing the net this year. Many of those hours will undoubtedly be spent scrolling social media. This brings us to the next question, how many people will be using TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and how much time will they spend on each platform?

Monthly Active Users

Although it may seem like TikTok is taking over the social media scene, YouTube still dominates both TikTok and Instagram in its number of monthly active users. Not just by a little either - by over one billion! Here are TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube’s monthly active users broken down for you:

• TikTok - 1 Billion
• Instagram - 1.5 Billion
• YouTube - 2.56 Billion

Monthly Usage

Another important statistic to know is just how much time each of those users is spending on each platform. In other words, we know how many active users each platform has, but just how active is each user every month? 

• Instagram - 11.2 hours/month
• TikTok - 19.6 hours/month
• YouTube - 23.7 hours/month

These numbers are a little surprising as well. YouTube is #1, but Instagram and TikTok have swapped places as second and third runner up. Although Instagram has a half-billion more active users, TikTok scrollers are spending almost eight extra hours on the platform each month. That is a testament to the addictive nature of short-form video combined with TikTok’s sophisticated algorithm. 

Demographics by Platform

To learn which platform may be best for your brand, it’s helpful to know which platform has the audience that most closely matches your own. For example, is your audience made up more of men than women? Younger people vs. older? 

In the gender category, TikTok has the largest gap between male and female users, with women accounting for 56% of active users and men accounting for 44%. TikTok (not surprisingly) also has the youngest user base. The infographic depicts age ranges from 20-50+ for all three platforms, but drilling down on this data, even more, reveals that the largest audience on TikTok is between the ages of 10 and19. 

Instagram and YouTube are more similar in their percentages of male vs. female users and also in the age of their most active US users, who are between the ages of 25 and 45. 

Potential Ad reach

At the end of the day, money talks. And knowing the potential reach of your paid ads is an important statistic to know when learning which platform is the best for your biz. 

In this category once again, YouTube takes the cake over TikTok and Instagram. Its potential ad reach is a staggering 32.4% of the total population. That means your ad has the potential to reach 1 in 3 people in the entire world! 

Instagram and TikTok’s reach is nothing to shake a stick at. Instagram gets second place in this category with a potential reach of 18.7% and TikTok comes in third place at just over 11%. 

Ready to get started?

When it comes to customer engagement, and truly leveraging the power of social media, posting video content is only the tip of the iceberg. Social media contests, such as hashtag video contests, voting contests, and comment contests, can boost participation and interactions with your followers. To learn more about creating social media contests for your TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube followers, visit us at www.shortstack.com.