Is TikTok Really Gen Z’s Next Search Destination?

11/20/23—TikTok is a massive opportunity for SEO and search marketing. And surveys do show that many Gen Zers turn to TikTok to look for things to do, buy, and eat. But how widespread is the behavior, really?

Stats such as "74% of Gen Z uses TikTok search" are compelling. But in this survey (from Her College Media), 97% of respondents were women.

Men also use TikTok for search, but it's not possible to generalize the behavior to all of Gen Z based on this study alone.

It's also worth emphasizing that while 51% of respondents chose TikTok over Google as their top search engine, that means 49% did not.

That's a majority, but not a strong majority.

The last project I worked on at Insider Intelligence was a study of US Gen Z social media activities and the platforms social users ages 15-26 turned to for those activities. The full report is gated for clients, but you can see a preview and free chart here.

Here are some trends I uncovered:

➡️ Search is a much less common activity in social media than watching videos, viewing Stories, or direct messaging. 41% of US Gen Z social users search for information using keywords on social media.

➡️ More Gen Zers who search on social media do so on YouTube than on TikTok. TikTok may get all the attention, but across both teen and adult Gen Zers, YouTube was more likely to be used for search in the past month.

➡️ YouTube was also more likely to be Gen Z's go-to for searching over TikTok, but the difference was small. The takeaway: TikTok does not have a lock on social search behavior.

➡️ Education was the most common social search topic. More than 6 in 10 Gen Z respondents who searched on social media said they’d looked for tutorials or how-tos in the past month. The second most common topic was celebrities or creators.

My advice to marketers: Don't put all your social search eggs in the TikTok basket. It's an important platform but not the only one Gen Zers use for search.