IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/prbchp/978-3-030-76520-0_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The New Adult on the Block: Daily Active Users of TikTok Compared to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram During the COVID-19 Crisis in Belgium

In: Advances in Digital Marketing and eCommerce

Author

Listed:
  • Johan Hellemans

    (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

  • Kim Willems

    (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

  • Malaika Brengman

    (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Abstract

It is believed that due to quarantine regulations during the covid-19 crisis, more people are attracted to social media. Especially TikTok seems to be linked to this crisis, given its rise to fame during the same period. However, to date, very little is known about TikTok regarding the number of users or usage characteristics. While considered a Social Network Site (SNS) oriented toward a younger audience of kids and teens, we hypothesized that TikTok would find its way to mainstream adult audiences, given the increasing attention devoted to this particular SNS in popular media. Cross-sectional data from 2500 Belgians (age between 18–64 years old) during the covid-19 crisis in 2020 show an expanding adoption of TikTok in daily active users (DAU). Further logistic regression analyses on the number of DAU show individual differences in sociodemographic background comparing SNS Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. The adult’s resulting profile on TikTok is younger, less graduated, with a lower income, living in urban areas, and having kids. Contrary to expectations, we did not find a gender effect nor a student effect. While not yet at the level of Facebook and Instagram, TikTok succeeded to quickly gain momentum in the adult space, to a level that is reaching that of a longer-standing platform like Twitter.

Suggested Citation

  • Johan Hellemans & Kim Willems & Malaika Brengman, 2021. "The New Adult on the Block: Daily Active Users of TikTok Compared to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram During the COVID-19 Crisis in Belgium," Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, in: Francisco J. Martínez-López & David López López (ed.), Advances in Digital Marketing and eCommerce, pages 95-103, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-030-76520-0_10
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-76520-0_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-030-76520-0_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.