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2022 influencer marketing trends across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube: Hype Auditor

HypeAuditor, the AI analytics platform for brands that use influencer marketing, has released its third annual report, State of Influencer Marketing 2022, unveiling the key influencer marketing trends in 2021 across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

Overall, the report estimated that the global Instagram influencer market will grow from USD $13.8 billion (A$19.3 billion) in 2021 to $22.2 billion (A$31 billion) by 2025. The rise of social commerce, and the redistribution of the advertising budget from television and offline towards digital advertising, are some of the key drivers of this growth.

When it comes to fraud, HypeAuditor’s data revealed that almost half of Australian Instagram influencers (49%) continued to be impacted by fraud in 2021. Despite this high number, there has been a decrease of 6.16% since last year, indicating a slight and rather slow progress by Instagram in its fight against the use of fraudulent methods on its platform. Micro (1,000 to 5,000 followers) and Nano (5,000 to 20,0000 followers) influencers experienced the most decrease in fraudulent activities with 4.41% and 6.76% decrease respectively.

After a year of releasing multiple new features and functionalities to inspire creativity and help users better engage with content, TikTok took the first place as the top growing social media platform in 2021, reaching 1 billion active users,  an 18.3% increase in 2021. Two-thirds (64.8%) of TikTok users are under the age of 24, of which 39% are between 18-24 years of age.

However, despite the significant growth in active users, the engagement rate (ER) across all influencer tiers on TikTok has dropped compared to 2020. Mega-influencers (over 1 million followers) have the highest ER of 13.9%. Some of the fastest growing influencer accounts on TikTok include comedian @Adammilardovicc who saw a 4064% growth, fashion model @unicewani grew her TikTok account by 1018% reaching 4.8 million followers and Melbourne-based @rusalien with 4.7 million followers following 755% growth.

When it comes to marketing specialists preferred social media channels, Instagram came out on top with 68% saying they use the platform for their marketing campaigns. Instagram creators open up huge opportunities for brands looking to market their products and services in an authentic way as customers get to know about a brand from someone they trust and have been following already.

On the other hand, due to its highly engaging visual medium that boasts a massive viewer count of 2 billion logged-in monthly users, according to the report, 56% of marketers name YouTube videos as the most important type of content for Influencer Marketing. Short form video content continues to offer a huge advantage to digital marketers. The ultra-snappy nature of Shorts allows marketers to funnel bitesize chunks of information to followers, without demanding they watch a long video. The other big advantage of Youtube is its reach – 26,400 influencers on YouTube have more than 1 million subscribers, which represents a big opportunity for brands to reach new demographics and audiences.

HypeAuditor CEO and co-founder, Alexander Frolov, commented, “The influencer marketing industry continued to gain momentum and popularity in 2021, in part due to the increased reliance of consumers on social media as e-commerce platforms. Consumers and brands alike are increasingly realising that TikTok is a force to be reckoned with. Australia has witnessed more and more politicians, even Prime Minister Scott Morrison, join TikTok in the past 12 months to connect with the younger generation ahead of the upcoming federal election.

“We can expect social commerce to become more mainstream in 2022 as more social media platforms continue to provide new and innovative selling solutions to make shopping within the platform as easy as possible.”

For the purpose of this research, HypeAuditor analysed and combined data on 136,000 Instagram influencer accounts, 5,000 YouTube channels, and 6,400 TikTok accounts from Australia.

Once an influencer account gets into HypeAuditor’s database, its main metrics are calculated based on the influencer’s audience, content, subscriptions, and activities using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Data was collected in January 2022 and reflects average metrics for 2021.

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