'Facebook is for the oldies'

The primacy of TikTok as a platform for fuelling power among young people is laid bare in The Influence Index.

The Inspired Unemployed: Jack Steele and Matt Ford. Picture: Nick Gascoine

The primacy of TikTok as a platform for fuelling power among young people is laid bare in The Influence Index.

Forget all the other social platforms: TikTok is where the money and the power is now. 

A young audience with disposable income and a video-first interface has taken TikTok from fringe player to the most powerful platform in 48 months. The Oz can reveal TikTok accounts for 62% – and growing – of the total audience of the country’s top social media creators.

The phenomenal TikTok growth of The Inspired Unemployed – former labourers from the NSW south coast who made a name with comedy videos on Instagram – demonstrates why creators hold all the cards.

Research prepared by Storyful for The Influence Index found that TikTok accounts for 62% of the total audience of the top 50 influencers, and was the main platform for 80% of the top 20 influencers. 

The top 50 had a total of 7.6 billion likes on their TikTok content, compared with 4.45 million engagements on Instagram in the last three months. TikTok recently surpassed a billion users, and its users spend an average of 95 minutes per day on the app.

The Inspired Unemployed – Jack Steele and Matt Ford – originally launched their satirical channel on Instagram, and have since expanded to TikTok and YouTube.

The Inspired Unemployed: Jack Steele and Matt Ford. Picture: Nick Gascoine

They now have 1.4 million followers on TikTok. They have collaborated with global fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Fendi, and have launched their own beer brand, Better Beer. Steele says that the pair’s “tribe” is on Instagram, given that’s where they started, but that their largest audience now is on TikTok. Facebook and Instagram are slowly becoming less relevant for influencers, he adds.

“I guess it sounds bad, but it’s an older generation,” Mr Steele said of Facebook. "The oldies love it. We’re like ‘wow, this is amazing, we’re killing it over there’, but you just don’t have the same connection because it’s not our audience.

“Instagram feels like our family, whereas TikTok was just this random platform that we felt we had to get on because everyone was getting on it. 

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“And luckily we got on it early, and now we love it. Originally it just felt like a bunch of bots and random comments, but now it’s like a proper thing, it’s legit.

“TikTok scared the shit out of Instagram, and Instagram is now chasing TikTok’s tail with Reels and everything, and that just frustrated us because they had like four different platforms happening, like Instagram Video, and IGTV. Now it’s just all one thing, Reels, which is great.

"But Instagram is slowly slipping a little bit.”

Read more: How to make money on TikTok 💸💸

Meta’s vice president of Facebook, Tom Alison, told The Australian that his company’s increased reliance on Reels – short-form video similar to TikTok’s – would help it become “cool” again. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg mentioned TikTok by name five times during the company’s recent fourth-quarter earnings call and video currently accounts for 50% of time spent on Facebook.

“It’s gonna be a challenge, for sure,” Alison says of making Facebook relevant for young people again. “But, you know, my confidence is certainly growing. And I’ll tell you this. We have seen very good growth of Reels on Facebook over this past half, and in particular we’re seeing it being embraced by young adults in a way that I haven’t seen for a lot of our products in the past.“

Leaked internal research, first reported by The Australian earlier this year, showed Facebook’s Instagram platform has seen a slump in young local users.

Prepared for Facebook executives, the research, dated March 2021, warns of “concerning” and “problematic” declines in the amount of time teenage users in Australia are spending on the photo-sharing platform – down 9% to 36 minutes a day over six months – and how much content they are producing​.

The amount of content being produced by teenage users locally fell 7%, the data revealed. “Young adults struggle to identify the primary value proposition for Facebook,” researchers said in an internal slide deck dated May 2021. “Young adults want uplifting and motivating content, yet see Facebook content as negative, fake and boring.”

TikTok is facing its own issues, after the company’s local executives admitted staff in China are able to access users’ private data. Australian general manager Lee Hunter and director of public policy Brent Thomas, in a letter to Liberal senator James Paterson, said that TikTok employees – including those in China – could access the data of Australian users.

A TikTok spokesman said that Australian user data was stored in the US and Singapore.

The Influence Index will be published online by The Oz this Thursday