Making TikTok, tick

With an election looming in the UK we were pleased to be asked by our friends at Campaign Lab to examine political discourse on TikTok and identify lessons for progressive voices looking to reach important audiences on the wildly popular video sharing platform. 

Using our AI-assisted research methodologies we examined more than 30,000 videos relating to mainstream political discourse in the UK and discovered that:

• Political TikToks are widely shared beyond TikTik with an average ‘off-platform’ share rate of 7 times per video in our sample. 
• The cost of living has been the biggest political issue on mainstream UK politics TikTok this year with around 20% of videos in our sample relating to this topic.

• TikTok users have a strong appetite for factual information (contrary to popular belief) and videos tagged as factually informative (5%) account for 11% of plays in the sample. They also receive, on average, more than double the number of plays that news reports do.  
• Influencers and independent content producers are easily rivalling established media for the eyes and ears of TikTok users engaging with politics. 

These findings lead us to make a series of strategic recommendations for social media campaigners. You can read these and get all the facts and figures via the link below.