Popular Chinese social media platform TikTok has set its sights on getting a larger chunk of advertising spend in SA .
The company, which has been under scrutiny in various countries, including the US and India, due to its Chinese roots, is one of the fastest-growing social media and video entertainment platforms in the world, with more than 1-billion active users.
The group’s TikTok for Business unit is focused on bringing advertisers onto the platform.
Shadi Kandil, global business solutions GM at TikTok for Middle East, Turkey, Africa and Pakistan, told Business Day that business in SA was growing at a good pace.
He looks after a geographical area from Central Asia, the borders of Kazakhstan to Bangladesh, accounting for 85 countries. TikTok offers advertising in 25 of these.
“We started our journey in SA in late 2021. It’s been a journey of continuous growth,” Kandil said.
According to local digital marketing agency CSA Sha-Izwe, there were more than 17.46-million TikTok users aged 18 and above in SA in 2024. At the time, the platform trailed behind Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook with 26-million users and Google’s YouTube with 25.1-million.
Citing figures from Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company, the agency said TikTok ads reached nearly 43.2% of all adults above 18 in the country, equating to 38.5% of SA’s internet user base at the beginning of 2024.
Kandil said “there’s a pecking order of engagement towards advertising content”.
Experts credit a big part of the success of advertising on TikTok to the entertaining nature of content that includes promotional material. In other words, young people find promotional content on the app to be enjoyable.
Market research firm Statista says ad spending of $273.37m (just under R5bn) is expected in 2025, with a projected market volume of $427.18m by 2030.
Companies such as Sanlam, inDrive, Luno, Hippo.co.za and Netflix SA already use the platform to advertise.
Kandil said companies and brands were also working with content creators to have their products and services mentioned in or incorporated into videos that would otherwise be considered general entertainment. This means ads that are not explicitly formatted as such.
“A higher order of engagement is when they create content together with users. That is user-generated content that is driven by brands and this becomes a collaboration.
“The highest order of engagement is when it is creator-led. Creators use their authentic voice, and they partner with brands and it’s not a scheme, it’s not hidden messages. It’s clearly a message that is promoting a brand, but espoused and endorsed by a creator.”
Kandil said this type of content carried the most weight with consumers because “these creators would have amassed a certain following with their users and there’s a sense of trust in what that creator is sharing.”
TikTok has been making inroads locally in growing its share of advertising spend. So much so that the company has found itself in the crosshairs of local regulators wanting to balance the scales and support local media owners that have been relegated to fringes by the unchecked rise of international tech giants.
Last month, the Competition Commission’s media and digital platforms market inquiry released a series of findings against tech giants Google, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, OpenAI, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok.
Estimates by the Wits journalism department show internet giants, including Facebook and Google, have taken as much as 60% of local advertising revenue over the past decade. TikTok is a growing player in this market, with more users in SA than rivals Instagram and X, according to some estimates.
The commission said that “TikTok is dominant in short-form video” and “is likely to become more important in digital advertising as they improve monetisation of an already large consumer base”.
For now, the commission said there was no evidence that the platform had prejudiced traditional media houses.
“TikTok is still growing and still trying to monetise its own platform, but there is no evidence currently that it deliberately deprecates news content or hinders monetisation,” said the authority.
“Due to the growing interest in news content on TikTok, news media are putting more of their content on TikTok, whereas previously they would have focused on Facebook and X. While TikTok started as a purely entertainment platform, as it grows and matures, so the content loaded onto the platform has evolved.”
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