Dive Brief:
- An August survey by marketing agency MGH of 701 TikTok users found 36% visited restaurants after viewing TikTok videos featuring the businesses.
- About 55% of survey users said they wanted to visit restaurants because videos of the food looked appealing. Fifty-one percent of users said they visited restaurants because of new menu items featured in videos.
- Major brands, including Chipotle and Arby's, have recently launched campaigns on the social media app, which has a global user base of about 1 billion active monthly users and 65 million monthly users in the United States.
Dive Insight:
TikTok content creators, who MGH also surveyed, were even more likely than users to try restaurants they saw on the app. Sixty-five percent of TikTok creators reported visiting or ordering from a restaurant after seeing videos of it. But for all its viral power, TikTok users reported they were most influenced by the videos and opinions of people close to them.
"TikTokers are most heavily influenced by the restaurant opinions of users they know personally and trust," Emma Andrews, a social media account manager at MGH, wrote on the company's blog. "But, respondents reported that videos from TikTok food bloggers/influencers ranked second in their ability to affect their behavior."
Twenty percent of TikTok users reported traveling to a different city to visit a restaurant they'd seen on TikTok. Forty-five percent of users said they'd be willing to cross state lines to visit a restaurant.
MGH said the survey indicates TikTok could be a potential driver of sales for restaurants.
"As TikTok continues to increase in popularity and maintain a stronghold in modern culture, brands and marketers must invest in finding their place on the app," Andrews wrote.
Some of the bets restaurant chains have made on the app's ability to draw customers seem like they could be paying off. When Arby's leveraged a viral, user-generated TikTok video to debut a marketing campaign late last year, the company gain 200,000 followers on the app.
