What India and its influencers mean for TikTok

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has been making efforts to disconnect from China and set up its headquarters in any of its five major markets, including Mumbai in India.

This alone shows how important India is for TikTok. But there’s more to it, especially when it comes to influencers from India that engaged on the short video-sharing platform.

After the US, India has the highest number of influencers on TikTok, according to a recently released report by Hype Auditor, an AI-powered Instagram, TikTok and Youtube analytics tool.

While US accounts for 12.7 percent of overall TikTok influencers, India stands at second position with 7.77 percent of influencers coming from the country. Turkey is a distant third accounting for 2.8 percent influencers.

Of the 7.77 percent of influencers coming from India on TikTok, 12 percent influencers had over 100,000 followers.

India is a big loss for TikTok also because the country has been the biggest driver of new TikTok downloads, generating close to 660 million installs since its launch in 2017, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower.

TikTok’s core audience in India were male between 18 and 34 years old that accounted for 58.19 percent of the platform’s overall user base in the country.

In addition, there were also a large number of users between 13 and 17 years old and this age group accounted for 20.11 percent of TikTok’s overall user base.

What is more interesting is that Engagement Rate of Indian TikTok influencers was six percent higher than average worldwide Engagement Rate.

Engagement Rate is referred to as the total of all the Likes, Comments and Shares a post has received which is divided by the number of views.

Engagement Rate or ER is a commonly used benchmark of success on TikTok as it can determine if an influencer is connecting with their audience, the Hype Auditor report said.

While average Engagement Rate worldwide is 15.96 percent, average Engagement Rate in India is 16.24 percent.

Influencers on TikTok received cumulative 261.9 billion Likes and 1,353 billion views for their content.

On average, Indian TikTok influencers had over 423 videos uploaded into their feed.

The majority of Indian TikTok influencers had between 5,000 and 20,000 followers who collaborated with brands and were paid for advertising.

The report also pointed out that the post frequency and persistence of Indian influencers on TikTok showed that influencers treated TikTok more like a job than a hobby.