By Julia Tabisz • March 6, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
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TikTok wrapped up a successful year in 2024, even with a murky future ahead. Brands’ usage of the platform started strong and increased, and their marketing spend followed. But 2025 is shaping up differently. TikTok’s ban in the U.S. has officially moved from an uncertainty to a reality. Sure, it’s on hold for now, but a very real clock is ticking in a very real way.
And after a year of business as usual, brands are finally starting to act on the reality that TikTok might not exist for U.S. users in the long term. According to Digiday+ Research surveys of brand and retailer professionals conducted every six months, brands’ TikTok usage and — more importantly — their marketing spend have both fallen off as of the first quarter of this year.
Digiday’s Q1 survey found that just short of three-quarters of brands and retailers are using TikTok (73% to be exact). This certainly marks strong usage among brands and even puts TikTok in the third-place spot among social platforms included in Digiday’s survey (after Meta’s big two). But it’s actually a big drop from six months ago.
In Q3 2024, Digiday’s survey found that 88% of brands and retailers were using TikTok. Six months before that, in Q1 2024, 71% were active on the platform.
In the case of marketing spend on TikTok, Digiday’s Q1 survey marked the first time since 2023 that overall spend has fallen — and it took a significant dip. Seventy percent of brand and retailer pros said in Q1 2025 that at least a very small portion of their companies’ marketing budgets goes to TikTok. That’s down from 87% six months ago.
Prior to this year, overall spend on TikTok had been trending upward. In Q1 2023, 54% of brands were spending at least a very small amount of their marketing budgets on TikTok. That percentage rose significantly to 78% in Q3 2023, rose slightly to 79% in Q1 2024 and jumped again to 87% in Q3 2024, before falling to 70% at the beginning of this year.
Another drop-off in spending occurred among the brands spending a lot of their marketing budgets on TikTok, Digiday’s surveys found. Just more than a quarter of brand and retailer pros said throughout 2024 that their companies put a large or very large portion of their marketing budgets toward TikTok (29% in Q1 2024 and 26% in Q3 2024). In Q1 of this year, just 12% of brands said they were spending a large or very large amount on the platform.
What’s more, Digiday’s surveys found that brands don’t see much incentive to put marketing spend toward TikTok. Not only is the platform’s future existence shaky at best at this point, but brands and retailers told Digiday that it doesn’t do much for them in the way of conversions or branding.
Just 17% of brand and retailer pros told Digiday in Q1 2025 that TikTok is the best social platform for driving conversions. This makes TikTok the third-best platform for driving conversions, according to Digiday’s survey, but a very distant third place. (Forty-three percent of brands said Instagram is the best platform for driving conversions and 33% picked Facebook.)
The 17% who said TikTok is best for driving conversions is also a drop from six months ago. Twenty-two percent of brands and retailers said the same in Q3 2024.
An even smaller 11% of brand and retailer pros said that TikTok is the best social platform for branding. This also puts TikTok in third place in this category (behind Instagram with 64% and YouTube this time at 13%). And it also marks a drop-off from six months ago, when 16% of brands and retailers picked TikTok as the best platform for branding.
https://digiday.com/?p=570873
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