Should My Small Business Be on TikTok?

Short answer: probably not first, and it depends almost entirely on how old your customer is. If you sell food, drinks, beauty services, or a physical product people can buy on impulse, TikTok has a real case and you should take it seriously. If you replace roofs or furnaces, do estate planning, or install kitchens, your money works harder on Google, Facebook, and YouTube first. That's not a hunch, it's Census data next to Pew data, and I'll show you both along with the parts that cut against me.

I got pulled into this because a chart went around this week ranking daily video watch time by platform. TikTok on top at 1.4 billion hours, YouTube at 1 billion, Meta at 100 million, Snapchat at 3.5 million. The caption said TikTok is the new king of video and if you're ignoring it you're making a big mistake.

So I went and checked all four numbers. What I found was worse than a wrong chart. Then I made two sourcing mistakes of my own writing this, and I'm going to show you those too, because they're the actual lesson.

Why can't anyone agree on how much video people watch?

Because not one of the four biggest video platforms currently publishes the number.

Start with Meta, because that bar is the most obviously broken. The chart put Meta at 100 million hours a day. The last time Meta published a Reels figure, Zuckerberg told analysts that Reels plays exceed 200 billion per day across Facebook and Instagram. Even if every one of those plays lasted only 10 seconds, that's over 500 million hours a day from Reels alone, more than five times what the chart claims. Meta also reported 3.6 billion daily active people across its apps last quarter, so 100 million hours works out to under two minutes of video per person per day.

Here's the catch, and it's one I got wrong the first time I wrote this. That 200 billion figure is from Meta's Q2 2023 earnings call, back in July 2023. Meta has never restated it. Reels went from roughly a $10 billion annual revenue run rate then to over $50 billion by late 2025, so the real number today is almost certainly a lot higher. I'm correcting a broken bar with a three year old number, and that is genuinely the best available.

Snapchat at 3.5 million hours has a similar problem. Snap reported 493 million daily active users in its most recent quarter. Divide it out and you get about 25 seconds of video per user per day, which is implausibly low. Although to be fair, Snap has never defined or published a "video watch hours" figure either, so that bar isn't wrong so much as unsupported.

YouTube's 1 billion hours is a real number. It's from February 27, 2017, posted on YouTube's own blog by their VP of engineering, Cristos Goodrow. He wrote that they'd hit the milestone "last year," which makes the underlying figure a 2016 number. That's ten years old and they've never publicly updated it. YouTube Shorts alone now does 200 billion views a day according to CEO Neal Mohan's 2026 letter, but views aren't hours, so that doesn't close the gap either.

TikTok's 1.4 billion is the only bar in a plausible range. It's also unverifiable, because TikTok has never published watch time at all.

So here's the finding. YouTube said it once in 2017 and went quiet. Meta reports plays instead of hours, and its last play count is from 2023. TikTok publishes nothing. Snap reports users, not video hours. The metric on that chart's axis is not something any of these companies currently releases. Nobody did bad math. The numbers don't exist, and somebody who needed four bars went shopping across five stat-aggregator blogs to fill them in.

How do I know if a marketing stat is any good?

Ask two questions. Who originally published it, and when.

That sounds obvious. It caught me twice on this exact article, so let me show you both instead of pretending it didn't.

The first one you already read. I originally wrote that the Meta figure came from an earnings call on October 29th, 2025. It didn't. It's from July 2023. I'd picked the date up from a search summary and repeated it as though I'd read the transcript myself. Same mistake as the chart, just smaller.

The second one is worse, and it cost me something. I had a stat lined up: 44% of adults aged 30 to 49 use TikTok. I went to the Pew report to cite it properly and the age breakdown was locked inside a chart image rather than published as text. I couldn't verify it, so I cut the number and wrote a fairly pleased-with-myself passage about how I'd nearly published something unsourced.

Then a fact-checker found it in about a minute. It's sitting on Pew's Social Media Fact Sheet, from the identical survey, published as plain text: 63% of 18 to 29 year olds, 44% of 30 to 49, 30% of 50 to 64, and 12% of 65 and over. The number was properly published the entire time. I just stopped looking after the first place I checked.

So I managed to get it wrong in both directions on one article. I published a date I hadn't verified, then cut a real number because I gave up too early. And the second one bothers me more, because 44% cuts against the argument I'm making here. The stat I couldn't be bothered to chase down was the one that helped the other side.

Nobody sits down intending to publish a bad statistic. You find a number that fits what you already think, it sounds about right, and you don't push hard enough. Here's a short list of things that get repeated constantly and don't hold up:

"40% of young people use TikTok instead of Google." This traces to Prabhakar Raghavan, then Google's search chief, speaking at a conference on July 12, 2022. He said "something like almost 40%," he was talking about TikTok and Instagram combined, the split was never disclosed, it covered 18 to 24 year olds only, and it was specifically about finding a place to eat lunch. Google said the data might be published later. It never was.

"46% of Google searches have local intent." An unnamed Google employee said this at a conference in 2018. Google never published it as research, never defined what "local intent" means, and never updated it. It's eight years old and it's in half the local SEO decks in America.

"TikTok ads are way cheaper than Meta ads." There's no credible independent study supporting any specific number here. Every figure in circulation comes from agency blogs with no disclosed sample size or methodology. The cost difference might well be real. Nobody has published proof.

If you're paying an agency and they hand you a deck full of percentages, ask where each one came from. A good one will tell you, and will say "I don't know" when that's the answer. If you want to know what to expect from a real one, I put together an honest breakdown of what social media marketing actually costs around here.

Is TikTok actually worth it for a small business?

For some businesses, absolutely, and I want to make that case properly rather than wave it off.

TikTok Shop did an estimated $15.1 billion in US sales in 2025, up 68% from the year before, and roughly $11.8 billion in the first half of 2026 alone. That estimate comes from Momentum Works, a research firm, and it's one vendor's number rather than an audited figure, so hold it loosely. Very little in US retail is growing at that rate. If you sell a physical product someone can buy in the next thirty seconds, that's a real channel and ignoring it is a genuine mistake.

One number from that same report deserves equal billing, though. Momentum Works counted 803,500 US TikTok Shop stores, and more than half of them recorded zero sales. Just over 2,000 cleared a million dollars in GMV. So the channel is enormous and most people who open a store on it sell nothing at all. Both of those are true at once, and any agency quoting you the first number without the second one is selling you something.

Restaurants are the other clear case. Toast surveyed about 1,450 US diners in the fall of 2025 and found TikTok drives 38% of Gen Z restaurant discovery, the single biggest channel, ahead of word of mouth. Toast sells restaurant point-of-sale systems so they've got a horse in this race, and their own footnotes disagree with their body copy about the sample size and the field dates, which you should know. It's still better sourced than most of what gets quoted in this space and I couldn't find anything contradicting it.

There's a structural argument too. TikTok's recommendation system doesn't use follower count as a direct ranking factor, which they've stated in their own engineering explainer, though that post dates to 2020 and it's a company describing its own product. Taken at face value, a brand new account's video enters roughly the same distribution test as a big account's. Facebook and Instagram lean harder on your existing followers. So a business starting from zero genuinely can get seen faster on TikTok, and that isn't a myth, it's how the two systems are built differently.

And TikTok is growing here. Pew has US adult usage going from 21% in 2021 to 37% in 2025, while Facebook and YouTube stayed flat. Anyone telling you TikTok is a teenager thing is working from a 2020 picture.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because it comes up on every sales call: the ban question is over. The TikTok US joint venture closed on January 22, 2026, with Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX each holding around 15% and ByteDance under 20%. If someone's still telling you not to build on TikTok because it might disappear, that argument expired a year ago.

So where should a local business actually spend?

Here's where the demographics get useful, with the caveats attached.

Pew surveyed 5,022 US adults between February and June of 2025 and published in November. YouTube reaches 84% of American adults. Facebook 71%. Instagram 50%. TikTok 37%. The line that matters most for a local business comes straight from the report: YouTube and Facebook are the only platforms a majority of every age group uses. Facebook peaks among 30 to 49 year olds at 80% of them.

TikTok by age from that same survey, including the number I almost left out: 63% of 18 to 29 year olds, 44% of 30 to 49, 30% of 50 to 64, and 12% of 65 and up. That 44% is higher than most local business owners assume.

Daily use is where the gap really opens. In a companion Pew survey of 5,123 adults, about half of American adults open Facebook and YouTube every single day. For TikTok it's 24%. Among 30 to 49 year olds, 58% are on Facebook daily. So TikTok does reach a lot of middle-aged Americans. Facebook reaches them far more often.

Now put that next to who buys expensive home services. The Census Bureau's housing survey from July 2026 puts homeownership at 35.2% for people under 35, 60.9% for 35 to 44, 69.7% for 45 to 54, and 78.6% for people 65 and over. The National Association of Realtors reported in November 2025 that the median age of an American home buyer hit 59, an all-time high.

I want to be careful with that 59, because it's a transaction number and not an ownership number. The person who buys a house at 59 isn't necessarily the person whose water heater dies. Plenty of your customers are 42 year olds who bought a place in 2019 and have never moved. NAR's survey also runs on a 3.5% response rate, so treat it as directional rather than precise. What the Census data says more reliably is that homeownership doesn't cross 50% until people are in their late thirties and it climbs every decade after that. Your customer base skews older because homeownership skews older, and nobody disputes that part.

That's the real answer, and it has nothing to do with which app has more global watch hours. A platform can be the biggest thing on earth and still be the wrong place for your business, because you don't have a global audience. You've got a service area that's maybe forty miles wide.

What should I do this week?

If you sell food, drinks, beauty, fitness, or a physical product, put real effort into short video and treat TikTok and Reels as a serious channel. Your buyer is young enough and the discovery behavior is documented.

If you sell high-ticket home services, professional services, or anything a 55 year old buys, get your Google Business Profile and your reviews right first, because that's where people check you out before they call. Then Facebook, because your buyer opens it daily. Then YouTube, which is worth more than local businesses think. Nielsen had YouTube at a record 13.8% of all American TV time in May 2026, the largest share of any distributor for the third month running. It's the only television buy a local contractor can actually afford, and you can draw a circle around your service area.

Whatever you pick, put a tracking number or a form on it so you know what worked. That matters more than the platform choice does. Most of the local businesses I talk to can't tell me where their last ten customers came from, and that's a bigger problem than being on the wrong app. If you want help sorting out which channels are worth your money, that's most of what we do when we build a marketing system for a local business.

And one last admission, since this whole piece is about sourcing. There is no good published data on where local service business leads actually come from. I went looking for a representative survey of home services lead sources and there isn't one. Every percentage you've ever seen on that is unsourceable. So anyone telling you with total confidence that 60% of contractor leads come from any single channel is guessing, and that includes the people who agree with me.

Common questions

Is TikTok bigger than YouTube?
Nobody can answer that with published data. YouTube last released daily watch hours in February 2017 and TikTok has never released the figure at all. On US reach, Pew has YouTube at 84% of adults and TikTok at 37%. On time per user, most estimates put TikTok ahead. They measure different things and both are partly guesswork.

Should a plumber or HVAC company be on TikTok?
Not as a first move. Census data puts homeownership at 35% for under-35s and 79% for over-65s, so your buyer concentrates in the older brackets where TikTok is weakest. Google Business Profile, reviews, and Facebook will do more per dollar. That said, 44% of 30 to 49 year olds are on TikTok, so it's a reasonable second or third channel once the basics are working.

Which platform has the best organic reach for a new business account?
TikTok, structurally. Their recommendation system doesn't treat follower count as a direct ranking factor, so a new account's video gets tested on roughly the same footing as an established one. Instagram and Facebook lean more on your existing followers. Just remember reach is not revenue, and more than half of TikTok Shop's US stores have never made a sale.

How do I tell if a marketing statistic is trustworthy?
Ask who originally published it and what year. If the trail leads to a stat-aggregator blog citing another stat-aggregator blog, it isn't a source. Company earnings calls, SEC filings, Pew Research, and the Census Bureau are. And check more than one page on the original site, because I cut a real Pew number from this article by giving up after the first place I looked.

Can I just ignore TikTok if my customers are older?
For now, mostly, but check back yearly. TikTok went from 21% to 37% of US adults between 2021 and 2025 while Facebook and YouTube stayed flat, and it already reaches 44% of 30 to 49 year olds. The age gap that makes it skippable today is narrowing every year, so this is a decision to revisit rather than settle.

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