Insider Intelligence predicts that TikTok will become the third largest social media platform, behind Facebook and Instagram, with 755 million active monthly users in 2022. This follows a growth of 59.8% in 2020 and 40.8% in 2021. According to the latest data from Facebook, the number of active monthly users has risen to 2.91 billion, reflecting a 6% year-on-year growth. Recently, Instagram employees leaked that their platform has surpassed 2 billion monthly users, up from 1 billion reported in June 2018.
However, Insider Intelligence's expectations for 2022 use a slightly different calculation method. The company has its own definition of active monthly users, which may differ from the definitions used by the companies it analyzes. For instance, it counts only users who log in at least once a month consistently over a calendar year and attempts to exclude fake accounts from its estimates, as reported by Yahoo Finance and reviewed by Al Arabiya.
According to the company's estimates, the total number of active monthly users will reach 2.1 billion in 2022, followed by Instagram with 1.28 billion users. TikTok will then have 755 million monthly users, ahead of Snapchat and Twitter.
App intelligence firm Sensor Tower reported that the short video app surpassed 2 billion downloads across the Apple Store and Google Play in the first quarter of 2020. A separate report from App Annie later revealed that TikTok experienced a 325% growth in 2020, with the monthly time spent by each user on the app increasing significantly more than any other app, reaching a 65% growth in the United States alone, surpassing Facebook.
In July 2021, Sensor Tower noted that TikTok, along with its sister app Douyin in China, became the first non-Facebook mobile app (excluding games) to reach 3 billion downloads worldwide across the App Store and Google Play, while global consumer spending on TikTok exceeded $2.5 billion, placing the app among a select few apps that have achieved this milestone, such as Tinder, Netflix, YouTube, and Tencent Video.
While other companies predicted that TikTok's monthly active user base would exceed a billion in 2021, Insider Intelligence's forecasts are somewhat more conservative due to its methodology. However, it predicts that the app will continue to grow at a slower rate of 15.1% in 2022. As a result of its growth, TikTok's share of total time spent on social media is also projected to rise, with Insider Intelligence forecasting that TikTok will capture 20% of users' time by 2024.
