Why do half of Gen Z use TikTok for search?

This all comes off the back of news that kids and teens are watching (on average) 91 minutes of TikTok per day compared with just 56 minutes of YouTube.

Yep, an app on the scene for less than 7 years is eating Google’s lunch across two verticles. What is it to do? Google Maps is a good proxy. Gen Z never used printed roadmaps, so, naturally, aren’t using an app that looks like one. Google’s answer: Immersive View, a way to explore space (visually) via AI. How is that thinking applied to video and search? Somehow I don’t think it’s more YouTube Shorts. Read more

Matt Lees
Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of Most Clicked. I’m Matt and I’m your stand-in host for this week, Nathan’s wife has had a baby. So big congratulations to him. I am however joined by Kyle. Kyle, what are we going to talk about this week?

Kyle Campbell
Big congrats to Nath first of all, that’s awesome. Funny how I, we were waiting 20 minutes during the call beforehand and I was thinking where is he? Yeah, there’s a bit of a topic we can riff on today, actually. So I covered in my newsletter last week about how Google actually released a report saying that almost half of Gen Z now use social media and specifically TikTok for search, which is quite surprising coming from Google, you think that we’re trying to like crush this down a little bit. But it seems to me that they are leaning into this now and they’re probably ready to take it on. And I think you know, Matt, we were talking beforehand about first hearing something like that. You might be thinking now that that can’t be right. Yeah, you got ahead. You had some interesting takes on this.

Matt Lees
Yeah, that was my exact reaction when I first read it. I said no, surely not. And then I read a little bit more of what you had written. And I was like, Oh, actually, yeah, I fall into the same category and I mentioned to you earlier, Kyle, I took a trip to London earlier this year. And before I went, I was looking for places to eat. And I think a couple of years ago, I’d have gone to Google or to TripAdvisor. But I didn’t, I went to TikTok and it just gives you a really different experience and a different perspective on where it’s good to go. And yeah, I couldn’t believe I actually fit into the same category that you were, you were writing about?

Kyle Campbell
Yeah, I’m not quite in that category myself. I just, I don’t know, I think it’s like, I think you’ve reached a point, don’t you and then it becomes natural for you to do some sort of action. Like, I still don’t have the reaction to want to see a situation and take a picture of it and post it on social for instance. And I think I’ve got probably a little bit of a journey to go before I use TikTok or Instagram for search. But Gen Z, is not so much of a journey. It’s interesting to me as well, like Instagram, recently released they already have a map built into the app, but they’ve updated it in the last few weeks, I think. And you can now actually search locations based on the stories that people post. So there’s a lot of movement now for those innovations that Google came up with, and like tonnes of maps, locations, etc, just sort of eating Google’s lunch. So quite a scary time for the company. But they do have a few innovations happening themselves. They’re rethinking how people experience spaces. So they’ve invested in something called immersive view, which is absolutely fascinating. It’s sort of like, you know, when Google Earth was released, you can zoom in and see locations based on satellite photography. But the immersive view is built using AI. So it’s a much more fluid view of space and the activity that happens when you’re looking at these real-life sort of pictures, they’re all generated by AI. So you can look at a street in London and it looks like it’s happening now but actually, AI is filling in all the blanks so you can get a sense of how busy a place is. you can even go into buildings and look around them based on like older footage that has already been taken by Google. And you can see that they’re trying to design something for a generation that didn’t grow up with with roadmaps like you are me, Matt.

Matt Lees
It’s just another point that we were chatting about before we came on here to record the use of maps. And Elliott, who’s who’s behind the scenes producing Most Clicked. We kind of said to him, do you know what an A-Z is? And he didn’t, he didn’t really know what it was. And he, he kind of once we described it, he recalled it from his childhood but when I learned to drive, that’s what I used, I used a map. So the transition then to smartphones and using the Maps on smartphones makes sense. But I guess as new generations of users come through who have no experience with an A-Z or, you know, one of those big roadmaps that you used to have in your car back in the day. Yeah, it makes sense to change things up and I also mentioned to you Kyle, I have been in the market for a new car I can’t for the life of me remember which model it was but also been going around to garages, one of the salesmen mentioned to me a new heads up display that uses AI to map all of the directions into your vision onto the screen. So you can it tells you which lane to be in, where to turn, and even that I thought was insane. And that’s a step behind all the Google stuff you’ve been talking about.

Kyle Campbell
Yeah, I mean, Google has a bit of a journey to go on here don’t know we’ve just brought their products to contend in this space. And I know, that social media slowly is taking away a lot of the functionality that people used to rely on Google for. And I don’t know if you remember, but of a few years back a few years, but maybe about a year ago, now. Google was trying to integrate social sharing into its search engine results pages, which is a bizarre concept. So you could actually when you searched there was a call to action to share your results which is so odd. And they’ve had that failed project of Google Plus as well, haven’t they? Which was a Facebook clone when Facebook was cool. So yeah, they’ve got a lot of ground to make up here. Or maybe they don’t maybe they just have to move in a slightly different direction. But it’s quite sobering when you think of all the Google technology that we use. It was built probably around 10 years ago, isn’t it? Google workspace? Gmail is even older than that. Google Maps, all of these things are kind of old style. It doesn’t mean they’re not good but I couldn’t name a new product that has come out of Google in the last five years, perhaps maybe I’m missing something obvious. Obviously, they’ve got the hardware of that pixel and stuff like that. I’m struggling to pick out a piece of software and application that’s been built by Google. I don’t know if you know of any.

Matt Lees
I can’t see my head. And I think just to go back to your earlier point around Instagram, I’m not a big Instagram user so I can’t kind of speak from direct experience but you were talking about being able to see things based on a map. And it’s almost like Google started the trend and then other people are beginning to take over from that. When I was in London, my trip, that’s exactly what I needed, I needed to be able to be somewhere, go on to TikTok and then see everything that was around me so that I knew that I wasn’t looking for something that was 10 miles away across the city. So, you know, I’m excited by some of these things that are coming forward, they sound amazing.

Kyle Campbell
Yeah. And that’s how we see, isn’t it? You know, if you’re in a location you, you navigate based on context and place and what’s around you. Whereas a map, obviously used to be like the way that you did these sort of things. But you know, I remember trying to follow like road atlases and stuff, it’s bloody hard, because it doesn’t make, it’s not a one to one ratio and things and, you know, this, this red road here doesn’t look like the area you’re on, does it? And, you know, there are probably better ways to do this now, like your heads-up display. And yeah, I mean, as space and navigating spaces. I think technology is on the cusp now of like, your major disruptions in the area, like Google’s immersive view, and all those sorts of things. So, yeah, really interesting space and I’m glad Google released this report because it highlights that it’s aware that it needs to perhaps try something different if TikTok or Instagram is now meeting that sort of user need.

Matt Lees
So just before we wrap up, how do you think we can bring this back to the education space?

Kyle Campbell
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I wrote about was that if Instagram is releasing this sort of, in context, like a map that has stories on it, I think a brand could potentially publish stories at popular venues, you know, raise its profile that way, I mean, if a university based in a city and you perhaps have a problem embedding yourself in that local community, you know, a good way to go about that would be to find some of these locations and create your own stories around those. And this is something that we’ve probably done in the past, but we haven’t had a way to kind of connect that with a wider like location-based experience. That’s, that’s a good way into it. And the other takeaway is, just to be aware that you might be leaning quite heavy on SEO. And that makes complete sense because it’s a building block of the internet. But you shouldn’t discount the power of discovery. And, you know, designing content that is to be consumed natively in TikTok and Instagram. And to understand a lot of people were doing that already, but to see those sorts of statistics that Gen Z use TikTok as a utility, they use it to get something done as well as entertainment. I think that’s an important thing to bear in mind when you’re creating content for that platform.

Matt Lees
Yeah. Nice. Well, I’ve really enjoyed that episode. That was a good one. So thanks, Kyle. And thanks, everybody for watching. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve seen, and hopefully, we’ll see you all next week.