A student of mine recently posted it in my private group about TikTok versus Instagram saying, is TikTok going to kill Instagram? This is the question that's on everyone's mind these days. So in today's video I'm diving into the real statistics on Instagram versus TikTok. I'm looking at who's using each platform, how they're using it, and how easy it is to do business on each of these platforms. And stay tuned until the end where I'm going to share with you how I'm using TikTok in my Instagram-heavy business today and whether I've seen any actual impact to my business or not from TikTok, I'm Elise Darma and I've taught thousands of entrepreneurs like yourself, how to use Instagram so that it actually becomes a revenue stream in your business.
And today I'm covering the battle between TikTok versus Instagram and is TikTok better. Ah, the age old question: is TikTok better than Instagram? Well, the short answer is: it depends on what you want it to be better for. Is TikTok better than Instagram for getting more followers? Is TikTok better for brand exposure? Engagement? Is TikTok better for local businesses? Is TikTok better for personal brands? Is it just more fun than Instagram? I'm going to approach this question of whether TikTok is better than Instagram from the perspective of how it applies to a business.
It's really tempting to think that because you can grow so quickly on TikTok these days that it's automatically better than Instagram. I'm not going to lie. It is really fun to see a video get a lot of views really quickly on TikTok. This has happened to me a few times now and yes, it feels good to get that dopamine hit. But does getting eyeballs on your TikTok videos automatically make it the better platform for your business than Instagram? Let's dive into the statistics and compare TikTok to Instagram. Now before I dive into all the research that I've found, I just want to share with you my own little personal experiment. A couple of years ago I posted some footage of mine from Fyre festival. Check out this video if you don't know what I'm talking about, but I posted some footage of mine on Instagram and this post is from May 2017 and if I look at the insights of it, it's been almost three years and this post on Instagram has just over a hundred thousand views. Let's compare that to a similar video I posted on TikTok.
So I'm on my TikTok profile right here and here is again a Fyre festival clip. I posted this one day ago and let's just refresh just to make sure. We're currently at over 237,000 views, so that gives you a little bit of context. One video has been on Instagram for almost three years, 100,000 views. This one's been on TikTok for a day and we're up to almost 250,000 views. Let's first cover the demographics of TikTok versus Instagram. In terms of active users in the U.S., TikTok has 26 and a half million monthly active users. Compare that to Instagram where its monthly active users was last reported to be over a hundred million in 2018 so fair to say that in 2020 it's well over a hundred million monthly active users. Let's talk about the adults who are using both platforms because in business usually it's the adults who have the credit cards and they're the ones buying products and offers.
So when it comes to TikTok, over one in eight adults have joined TikTok. 60% of TikToks' U. S. audience is between 16 and 24, but that means 40% of TikToks audience is 25 plus. Compare that to Instagram where 57% of 25 to 29 year olds use Instagram. So majority. And 47% of 30 to 50 year olds use Instagram. Next, I looked into user behavior. Now with TikTok, 90% of TikTok users visit the app more than once a day. I'm one of those people. With Instagram, 63% of users login at least once a day. The average session for TikTok users is 4.9 minutes, which is longer than Snapchat or Instagram's. Instagram's average session is 3.1 minutes.
Next, I looked at the average total length of usage, so with TikTok users, the average user spends 52 minutes per day on TikTok. I'm actually not too surprised. It's a very addicting app. With Instagram in 2020 the average user session is 28 minutes, so almost half of TikTok. Next, in my comparison, I looked at how easy it was to connect your followers to your other platforms from either TikTok or Instagram. So our findings were with TikTok it's definitely less easy or clear on how to connect people to other platforms. One example is TikTok vocal coach who commented on one of my YouTube videos saying that her TikTok video went viral. She grew to 18,000 followers really quickly and today she's getting more leads on a weekly basis than ever before. We looked at her profile and her profile says 'online lessons' and then has a URL. It does lead them to a page where she can capture leads, but TikTok doesn't make it easy for people to tap on a URL. They have to manually type this in. With Instagram, as you probably know, you do get your one clickable link under your bio and if you have more than 10,000 followers, you get the swipe up feature in your stories, so between the two platforms, Instagram definitely makes it easier for your followers to connect with you elsewhere.
The bottom line in all of our research was that people love to see brands on social. I know for business owners, we all kind of get hung up on this idea of, well, I don't want to be spammy. I don't want to be salesy on social media, but people love to connect with brands there, so I might humbly suggest that you get over yourself and just show up as a real person on social media because there are people there wanting to connect with you there. Take the case of Instagram, 90% of accounts follow at least one business account on Instagram. Most say that they see brands on Instagram as popular, creative, entertaining and committed to building community. The platform is also really vital to the discovery phase of the typical customer journey. 83% of Instagram users have said that they discovered new products or services through the platform, so whether you prefer TikTok or Instagram, all of this is good news.
The data says that people like to see brands on social media, they like to follow and engage with brands and be entertained by brands. So what am I, an Instagram marketer, doing with TikTok in my business? Well, right now I think it's safe to say that I'm definitely in the experimental phase. I'm posting quite often to TikTok purely as an experiment to see, well one do I like it? Am I finding my target customer on TikTok and most importantly am I seeing them find my products and services on my website and my sales funnels and all the places where I am in the internet.
So far I am tracking anytime someone comes into my free masterclass or chats with me or emails my team member, I'm tracking and screenshotting every time someone says they found me on TikTok. So that's where I'm at right now, experimenting and tracking. But I'll definitely keep you up to date once I start to see an actual return in my revenue from TikTok. So you're seeing the visibility potential for TikTok, but you want the same thing for Instagram? I invite you to check out Story Vault. Story Vault includes hundreds of prompts and ideas of what you can share in your Instagram stories for your business so that you can get more eyeballs over to your profile. So if you need more visibility on Instagram, it's all inside of Story Vault. I'll leave the link for Story Vault right below this video. Go ahead, check it out. To ease and revenue. I'll see you in the next video.
So our findings were, so are, so are finding, sounds so Canadian..