A new Pew Research Center study matching the survey responses and on-site behaviors of U.S. adult TikTok users finds that a minority of avid posters create the vast majority of content on the site. And most users post seldom, if at all – instead using TikTok primarily to view and consume content made by others.

These findings come at a time when one-third of U.S. adults say they use the site and a growing share get news there. Among our key findings about how the American public is using TikTok:

A small share of users are responsible for producing the majority of TikTok content. The top 25% of U.S. adults on TikTok by posting volume produce 98% of all publicly accessible videos from this group. This is in line with the Center’s previous research on Twitter users, which found a similar ratio of highly active users creating the majority of content on the platform.

The typical TikTok user posts seldom, if ever. About half of all U.S. adults on the site have never posted a video themselves. And the typical user has not added any information to the “bio” field on their account.

The posting behaviors of younger adults do not stand out dramatically from other age groups. Users ages 18 to 34 are much more likely than their older counterparts to use TikTok in the first place. But around half of these younger users have ever posted on the site – similar to the share among users ages 35 to 49.

Users who have posted videos on TikTok are more active on the platform in general than non-posters. Posters typically follow more users, have more followers themselves, are more likely to have filled out their account bio and are somewhat more likely to find the content of their “For You” page extremely interesting.

TikTok users are more likely than not to find their “For You” page interesting. TikTok is defined by its algorithmically curated “For You” page, and users generally like the content the algorithm serves them. Some 40% of users say this content is either extremely or very interesting to them, far more than the 14% in total who say it is not too or not at all interesting.

The study began with a survey conducted in August 2023 of 2,745 U.S. adult TikTok users. It includes direct observation of the accounts and posting behavior of 869 respondents who volunteered to share their account handle for research purposes.

All these accounts – regardless of their privacy settings – contained basic account metadata. This includes their bio and display name fields, counts of followers and followed accounts, and the total number of “likes” the user had received on any videos they posted. For accounts set to public, we were also able to observe any public videos posted to the account to get a better understanding of adult TikTok users’ posting behavior.

Related:

• Americans’ social media use in 2023
• More Americans are getting news on TikTok
• What the public thinks about banning TikTok

Who posts videos to TikTok

Around half (52%) of U.S. adults on TikTok have ever posted a video on the platform.¹ And although there are substantial differences in which groups of Americans use TikTok in the first place, there are only modest differences in the posting behavior of users based on their demographic characteristics. Notably, there are no significant differences in the share of users who have posted on the site based on gender, political affiliation or educational attainment.

TikTok use is especially prevalent among younger adults – 56% of all U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 say they use the platform. But 52% of users in this age group have posted a video to their account. That is identical to the average among users overall, and similar to the share of users ages 35 to 49 who have ever posted.

A minority of users produce the majority of TikTok content from U.S. adults

While about half of U.S. adult TikTok users have ever posted a video at all, an even smaller share – 40% – have posted videos that are publicly visible. As a result, a relatively small share of users produce the vast majority of content that appears on the platform.²

The typical TikTok user does not customize their bio

TikTok users do not tend to present a detailed profile of themselves on their accounts.

Although 70% of users have changed their account nickname from the site-provided default, an identical share have not added any information to the “bio” field on their account. The median U.S. adult user follows 154 other accounts but has just 36 accounts who follow them – and has received no likes from other users.

How posters differ from non-posters in their use of TikTok

TikTok users who post on the platform differ from non-posters in several important ways. Those who have ever posted a video are nearly five times as likely to have customized the bio field on their profile. They are also a bit more likely to have updated their account nickname from its default.

Posters also engage with a lot more other accounts on TikTok: A typical (median) poster follows nearly four times as many other accounts as someone who doesn’t post, and they have more followers as well. While it’s true that a small share of U.S. adults on TikTok are highly prolific, not everyone who posts videos does this a lot. The median poster has put up a total of six public videos in the life of their accounts and received a total of 149 likes in return.

What TikTok users think of their ‘For You’ page

Some 85% of TikTok users say the content on their “For You” page is at least somewhat interesting, including 40% who call it either extremely or very interesting. Only 14% say it is not too or not at all interesting.

Younger users are especially interested in the content they see on the platform. Some 47% of users ages 18 to 34 say they find the videos on their “For You” page either extremely or very interesting, compared with 36% of users ages 35 to 49 and 31% of those 50 or older.

There are only modest differences on this question based on other demographic factors like gender, political affiliation or educational attainment. Similar shares of posters and non-posters find the “For You” page at least very interesting.

But posters are slightly more likely to report the highest level of interest in the material that TikTok’s content algorithm suggests to them. Some 17% of these users say they find the content of their “For You” page extremely interesting, compared with 11% of non-posters.

This report is a collaborative effort based on the input and analysis of the following individuals.

Primary Researchers

Samuel Bestvater, Computational Social Scientist

Research Team

Aaron Smith, Director, Data Labs
Gonzalo Rivero, Former Associate Director, Data Labs
Sono Shah, Senior Computational Social Scientist
Galen Stocking, Senior Computational Social Scientist
Regina Widjaya, Computational Social Scientist
Meltem Odabaş, Computational Social Scientist
Risa Gelles-Watnick, Research Analyst

Editorial and Graphic Design

Alissa Scheller, Senior Information Graphics Designer
David Kent, Senior Copy Editor

Communications and Web Publishing

Sogand Afkari, Communications Manager
Haley Nolan, Communications Manager
Sara Atske, Digital Producer

In addition, the project benefited greatly from the guidance of Pew Research Center’s survey methods team: Courtney Kennedy, Andrew Mercer, Dorene Asare-Marfo, Ashley Amaya, Arnold Lau and Dana Popky. This project also benefited from feedback by the Center’s Monica Anderson and Jeffrey Gottfried.

The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Overview

The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys. Panelists who do not have internet access at home are provided with a tablet and wireless internet connection. Interviews are conducted in both English and Spanish. The panel is being managed by Ipsos.

Data in this report is drawn from ATP Wave 133, conducted from Aug. 7 to Aug 27, 2023. A total of 11,945 panelists responded out of 12,925 who were sampled, for a response rate of 92%. The cumulative response rate accounting for nonresponse to the recruitment surveys and attrition is 4%. The break-off rate among panelists who logged on to the survey and completed at least one item is less than 1%. The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 11,945 respondents is plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.

Panel recruitment

The ATP was created in 2014, with the first cohort of panelists invited to join the panel at the end of a large, national, landline and cellphone random-digit-dial survey that was conducted in both English and Spanish. Two additional recruitments were conducted using the same method in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Across these three surveys, a total of 19,718 adults were invited to join the ATP, of whom 9,942 (50%) agreed to participate.

In August 2018, the ATP switched from telephone to address-based sampling (ABS) recruitment. A study cover letter and a pre-incentive are mailed to a stratified, random sample of households selected from the U.S. Postal Service’s Delivery Sequence File. This Postal Service file has been estimated to cover as much as 98% of the population, although some studies suggest that the coverage could be in the low 90% range.³ Within each sampled household, the adult with the next birthday is asked to participate. Other details of the ABS recruitment protocol have changed over time but are available upon request.⁴

We have recruited a national sample of U.S. adults to the ATP approximately once per year since 2014. In some years, the recruitment has included additional effort (known as an “oversample”) to boost sample size with underrepresented groups. For example, Hispanic adults, Black adults and Asian adults were oversampled in 2019, 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Across the six address-based recruitments, a total of 23,862 adults were invited to join the ATP, of whom 20,917 agreed to join the panel and completed an initial profile survey. Of the 30,859 individuals who have ever joined the ATP, 12,925 remained active panelists and continued to receive survey invitations at the time this survey was conducted.

The American Trends Panel never uses breakout routers or chains that direct respondents to additional surveys.

Sample design

The overall target population for this survey was noninstitutionalized persons ages 18 and older living in the U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii. All active panel members were invited to participate in this wave.

Questionnaire development and testing

The questionnaire was developed by Pew Research Center in consultation with Ipsos. The web program was rigorously tested on both PC and mobile devices by the Ipsos project management team and Pew Research Center researchers. The Ipsos project management team also populated test data that was analyzed in SPSS to ensure the logic and randomizations were working as intended before launching the survey.

Incentives

All respondents were offered a post-paid incentive for their participation. Respondents could choose to receive the post-paid incentive in the form of a check or a gift code to Amazon.com or could choose to decline the incentive. Incentive amounts ranged from $5 to $20 depending on whether the respondent belongs to a part of the population that is harder or easier to reach. Differential incentive amounts were designed to increase panel survey participation among groups that traditionally have low survey response propensities.

Data collection protocol

The data collection field period for this survey was Aug. 7 to Aug. 27, 2023. Postcard notifications were mailed to all ATP panelists with a known residential address on Aug. 7. 

Invitations were sent out in two separate launches: soft launch and full launch. Ninety panelists were included in the soft launch, which began with an initial invitation sent on Aug. 7. The ATP panelists chosen for the initial soft launch were known responders who had completed previous ATP surveys within one day of receiving their invitation. All remaining English- and Spanish-speaking sampled panelists were included in the full launch and were sent an invitation on Aug. 8. All panelists with an email address received an email invitation and up to five email reminders if they did not respond to the survey. All ATP panelists who consented to SMS messages received an SMS invitation and up to five SMS reminders. On Aug. 25, interactive voice recording reminder calls were made to 39 tablet households that previously provided consent to receive these reminders.

Data quality checks

To ensure high-quality data, the Center’s researchers performed data quality checks to identify any respondents showing clear patterns of satisficing. This includes checking for very high rates of leaving questions blank, as well as always selecting the first or last answer presented. As a result of this checking, two ATP respondents were removed from the survey dataset prior to weighting and analysis.

Weighting

The ATP data is weighted in a multistep process that accounts for multiple stages of sampling and nonresponse that occur at different points in the survey process. First, each panelist begins with a base weight that reflects their probability of selection for their initial recruitment survey. These weights are then rescaled and adjusted to account for changes in the design of ATP recruitment surveys from year to year. Finally, the weights are calibrated to align with the population benchmarks in the accompanying table to correct for nonresponse to recruitment surveys and panel attrition. If only a subsample of panelists was invited to participate in the wave, this weight is adjusted to account for any differential probabilities of selection.

Among the panelists who completed the survey, this weight is then calibrated again to align with the population benchmarks identified in the accompanying table and trimmed at the 1st and 99.5th percentiles to reduce the loss in precision stemming from variance in the weights. Sampling errors and tests of statistical significance take into account the effect of weighting.

Dispositions and response rates

Analysis of TikTok behavioral data

The analysis of TikTok users’ behaviors and activities on the platform is based on a subsample of 869 respondents to the main survey who said they use TikTok, agreed to share their TikTok handle for research purposes and provided a valid handle when asked. Researchers from the Center used these handles to collect information about respondents’ on-platform behaviors using automated web scraping.

Of the 11,945 panelists who completed the ATP Wave 133 survey, 2,745 said they use TikTok. These respondents were asked if they would be willing to share their account username with us for this study, and 996 agreed. After the survey was fielded, researchers reviewed each provided account individually and removed accounts that were suspended, invalid, or belonged to institutions, products or international entities. The analysis of TikTok behavioral data in this report is based on a total of 869 respondents who completed the survey and provided both consent and a verifiable TikTok handle.

This final sample of 869 U.S. adult TikTok users with valid, active usernames was weighted using an iterative technique that aligns its composition with that of all TikTok users on American Trends Panel Wave 133. The sample was weighted on the following dimensions: gender, age, race, years lived in the U.S., education, region, party identification, volunteerism, voter registration, metropolitan area, religious affiliation, frequency of internet use, and how interesting they find the videos on their TikTok “For You” page. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus 5.8 percentage points.

The following table shows the unweighted sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey.

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request. In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

How this report defines TikTok posters and measures posting volume

This report uses two slightly different approaches to measure the volume of content users produce on TikTok due to the specific characteristics of TikTok’s privacy settings. TikTok is similar to many other social media platforms in that posts and profiles can either be publicly listed or set to private. However, TikTok profiles are unusual in that they have a total “like” count that tallies up all likes on all videos, including private ones. In cases where a user has posted private videos that have received likes, it’s possible for researchers to observe those likes even if they can’t see the videos themselves.

For findings in this report that deal with whether or not a user has “ever posted” on TikTok, we treat the presence of publicly visible videos or any account-level likes as evidence of posting behavior.

For findings in which the volume of posts produced by a given user is referenced, we are only referring to publicly visible videos, as there is no method available to count private videos, even if the total number of likes is visible.

Question wording and respondent consent language for collection of TikTok handles

Respondents were asked to provide their Twitter handles for research purposes using the following language:

Measuring TikTok adoption

Figures in this report on the share of U.S. adults who use TikTok are drawn from the National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS). Ipsos conducted the NPORS for Pew Research Center using address-based sampling and a multimode protocol.

The survey was fielded from May 19 to Sept. 5, 2023. Participants were first mailed an invitation to complete an online survey. A paper survey was later mailed to those who did not respond. In total, 2,217 respondents completed the survey online, and 3,516 respondents completed the paper survey (total n=5,733). The survey was administered in English and Spanish. The AAPOR Response Rate 1 was 31%. The full methodology for NPORS (including margin of error) can be found here.