TikTok reveals its biggest yearly trends
From Demure to #science, here's what popped off on TikTok this year.
TikTok has released its yearly report on the year's biggest trends and moments.
The report highlights everything from music to books to sports.
Above all else, it shows that TikTok has become critical cultural infrastructure.
Much like YouTube last week, TikTok has released its report on the year’s biggest trends and moments.
The report begins with some celebratory stories of small businesses using TikTok to grow quickly. However, the real interesting tidbit here is that the number of TikTok Shop LIVE sessions hosted each month nearly tripled this year. After trying to make live shopping a thing for years now, TikTok finally has some traction.
BookTok is the next community highlighted in the report. Somehow, there were over 1.2 million #BookTok posts in the first 10 months of 2024, with the #Romantasy genre being particularly popular, growing 300% this year.
It goes without saying that TikTok is also dominant in the music industry. Going viral on TikTok is now almost a prerequisite for hit songs, as the top 10 Songs on TikTok globally accounted for over 200 million video creations and represent more than 8 billion streams on Spotify. Speaking of those top 10 songs.
Sports isn’t typically associated with TikTok, but, nonetheless, the social media platform dominated there too, as #SportsOnTikTok grew by 350% compared to last year. Unsurprisingly, much of this growth was due to the Olympics, which netted nearly two billion views on the app. Besides the Olympics, women's sports also had a moment this year, with posts using #WomenInSports increasing by more than 2400%.
Education also had a banner year, with 5.5 million #TeachersOfTikTok posts and a 45% increase in #science posts. This has enabled teachers like Shelby Lattimore and astronauts like Kellie Gerardi to amass millions of followers and potentially disrupt the very disruptable legacy educational system.
Last but not least, TikTok flexed its role as the internet’s cultural epicenter, highlighting “demure” and “brat” winning word of the year, the viral growth of “Man in Finance”, and the ascension of Moo Deng into a household name.
Overall, if there’s one thing to take away from the report, it’s that TikTok is more important than ever. It has truly become almost critical cultural infrastructure.
Now we’ll just have to wait and see if it stays legal.
