Image credit: Olivier Bergeron

TikTok follows behind only Facebook and Instagram as the biggest social network in the world.

TikTok has come to take over the world’s attention span and it’s doing a pretty good job, moving up the rankings yet again to make it into the top 3 of social platforms. It’s predicted that TikTok will surpass 1.5 billion total users in 2022 and its clear it’s not going anywhere, influencing even it’s largest competitors in the social sphere to change tact and explore the medium of short form, easily created videos.

The video sharing app burst onto the playing field just a few years ago following the success of spiritual predecessors like Vine and Dubsmash. In recent years it has taken the world by storm, particularly in a world on lockdown seeing monumental growth in popularity in the last 2 years. TikTok revenues grew 500% in Europe alone last year.

Now a new report from Insider Intelligence suggests that TikTok has overtaken both Snapchat and Twitter in their number of users globally. Looking at the number of monthly users (users who access TikTok at least once a month), they predict that TikTok will reach 755 million monthly TikTok users in 2022. This is 40.8% growth in 2021, following an incredible 59.8% of growth in 2020.

Insider Intelligence principal analyst, Debra Aho Williamson said: “The rise of TikTok is especially challenging for Snapchat, with which it competes head-to-head for the youth audience. Although TikTok does not share much similarity to Twitter, its massive size relative to the more-established platform is a clear reflection of the addictive nature of TikTok’s content.”

TikTok’s success does not go ignored by its competitors, most of which have followed their footsteps to launch an easy creation and sharing platform for short videos in their apps. YouTube have found huge success with Shorts, Instagram have been prioritising Reels more and more, Snapchat’s Spotlight offers their users short-form videos to explore, and even Twitter have been testing TikTok style content.

TikTok has had a huge cultural influence, taking the torch from YouTube which revolutionised the power of user-uploaded content to make it even easier with smartphones and a focus on short, snappy content. Using music as a backdrop to much of its content, TikTok has also had a massive influence on the music industry.

We’ve seen that TikTok can make an artist’s career blow up with the viral potential of the platform. It’s been seen time and again, with a single video capable of getting millions of views putting a song in front of millions of potential new listeners. With free distribution for artists to TikTok, we’ve seen our own artists collect millions of streams in recent years.

With the year coming to a close, you can see what one of the biggest culturally influencing platforms has been making popular with our list of the 10 top songs on TikTok in 2021. For an overall view of TikTok’s year and the content that’s made it so popular, check out the Year on TikTok, showing the top videos, music, trends, and more.